ORAL ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS

CHILDREN, SCHOOLS AND FAMILIES

The Secretary of State was asked—

Bullying

Lynne Featherstone: What steps his Department is taking to reduce the incidence of bullying of children with disabilities and special educational needs.

Kevin Brennan: In May, we produced new guidance that provides schools with comprehensive advice on how to prevent and tackle the bullying of children with special educational needs and disabilities. The guidance outlines statutory duties for heads and governors to prevent the bullying of those children. We are funding the Anti-Bullying Alliance and national strategies to provide support and challenge for local authorities and schools to ensure that the guidance is implemented effectively on the ground.

Lynne Featherstone: I thank the Minister for his answer. The recent Government guidance is a welcome step towards tackling such bullying, but it has not been given any serious promotion, so it is unlikely that many teachers or parents will even be aware of its existence. What specific measures does he plan to ensure that the guidance is given sufficient publicity to be effective in its aims?

Mr. Speaker: Order. I did not want to stop the hon. Lady when she was speaking, but I would prefer the supplementary question not to be read from a note. It is a response to the reply given by the Minister.

Kevin Brennan: I disagree with the hon. Lady that the guidance has not been given any publicity. It was launched by the Secretary of State and gained considerable publicity from that. Although, for obvious reasons, the Department does not send documents to every school in the country, we notify local authorities and schools through regular updates that guidance documents are available. As I said, we are funding the Anti-Bullying Alliance and the national strategies to provide the support and challenge for local authorities and schools to ensure that the guidance is implemented effectively on the ground.

Lynda Waltho: Does my hon. Friend agree that proposals to abolish independent appeals panels for excluded children would remove an important safeguard and possibly lead to further inappropriate exclusions for children with special needs?

Kevin Brennan: Yes, I do. It is all very well hon. Members coming to the House and occasionally asking us to do more for pupils with special educational needs, but the Special Education Consortium says that it is concerned that such a move would increase the vulnerability of children with special educational needs to exclusion. Children with SEN are already disproportionately represented in the exclusion statistics and that change would remove one of the few checks and balances operating in the country. John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, the head teachers union, has said:
	"Ending the right of parents to appeal to an independent panel against exclusion would, as I have said consistently in the past, lead to more parents going to the courts in an attempt to overturn their child's exclusion."

John Bercow: As the bullying of children with special educational needs and disabilities by other children is still, sadly, a relatively widespread phenomenon, I warmly welcome the guidance and some of the initiatives that are unfolding. Will the Minister accept, however, that sometimes, in the form of inadvertent unkindnesses and unawareness of the duty to deliver to disabled children, there can be cases of bullying committed by teachers and other work force professionals? In that context, would he like to say something about the special educational needs units within initial teacher training, which are, I think, to be rolled out later in the year, and could yield some benefits?

Kevin Brennan: Yes, and as the hon. Gentleman knows we want to strengthen those units within teacher training. We had quite a discussion about that on the Floor of the House during consideration of a recent private Member's Bill. He is absolutely right that on occasion, things can be said and actions taken that might constitute inadvertent bullying. It is clear that the most important thing is for all of us to see pupils with disabilities and special educational needs principally as pupils and human beings, not as people with a disability or a special educational need.

Nigel Evans: To follow on from that, clearly there cannot be any excuse for bullying, whether it is inadvertent or otherwise, but one group of people who may find themselves victims are those who are seen to be slow learners, and indeed specifically those with dyslexia. Will the Minister therefore give some hope that the Government will ensure that there are specialist dyslexia teachers in each school to make sure that the untapped potential of youngsters is unlocked for the rest of their lives?

Kevin Brennan: The hon. Gentleman will be aware that Jim Rose's review is looking at the issue of dyslexia and dyslexia teaching in schools, and he is quite right that pupils with dyslexia might find themselves subject to bullying of that kind. It is fair to say that this Government have done more on bullying than any Government ever. We are spending £3.7 million this year on anti-bullying programmes. I think it is also fair to say that there used to be a culture in schools of "Bullying does not happen in our school." I am glad to say that that is no longer acceptable.

Tim Loughton: I visited a special school in the midlands a while ago. It was facing closure, although children with special educational needs had flourished there after failing previously in mainstream schools where they had been bullied. They now face the prospect of being returned to those self-same schools.
	Given Mencap's estimate that eight out of 10 children with a learning disability have been bullied and six out of 10 of them physically hurt, together with Baroness Warnock's findings that enforced inclusion makes children with disabilities and SEN likely to encounter bullying, is not the only way, or one way, to reduce this problem for the Minister to announce an immediate moratorium on the closure of special schools?

Kevin Brennan: Children should go to special schools because such schools are right for them and their special educational needs. The idea that a child in mainstream education who has a special educational need should be sent to a specialist school because he or she is being bullied is a fundamental misconception.
	The rate at which special schools have been closing has slowed in recent years, and the percentage of pupils attending them went up last year.

Academies

Vincent Cable: How many academies he expects to be operational by the end of 2008.

Edward Balls: May I request your indulgence and that of the House, Mr. Speaker, and ask the House to join me in offering best wishes to my Department's parliamentary clerk, Mr. Mike Watts, who is retiring from the Department today after 21 years of loyal service?
	Eighty-three academies are already open. A further 49 will open this September, and two more in January 2009. As part of the national challenge, we plan to open a further 80 in 2009 and 100 in 2010. That will bring the total to more than 300.

Vincent Cable: As one who is working with my local council and the Department to facilitate two of those academies in the face of a strong anti-academy campaign from the local Conservatives, may I ask the Secretary of State to help remove one of the obstacles to the programme, namely his Department's insistence that the council carry financial risk from cost overruns although the schools will not be owned or run by the council?

Edward Balls: We are very grateful for the hon. Gentleman's support and that of the local authority, Richmond, in connection with the two academies being planned in his constituency. As he will know, discussions are in progress with the Swedish education group Kunskapsskolan. It is probably true to say that Labour and the Liberal Democrats have always been rather supportive of aspects of the Swedish model, but it does not surprise me that when pushed into power the Conservatives find supporting it rather more difficult.
	As for the hon. Gentleman's point about cost overruns, it is important for us to obtain value for money and to ensure that local authorities work closely with the sponsor, the governing body and our Department. We work to get things right on a case-by-case basis, but it is important for the risks to be shared. I assure the hon. Gentleman that cost overruns will not be an obstacle to progress for the academies in his constituency.

Derek Wyatt: Two weeks ago, the final appeal against the Isle of Sheppey academy was lodged by Cheyne school governors. If my right hon. Friend cannot answer my question now, could he possibly make a statement clarifying to parents on the Isle of Sheppey where their children will go this September? They have not a clue at the moment.

Edward Balls: It is obviously important for us to provide certainty for parents and for the young people themselves. I am sure that we shall be able to proceed. In our experience academies win the support of both parents and young people, but I am happy to examine the details and clarify the position for my hon. Friend as soon as possible, so that no more concern will be caused locally to children and parents.

David Evennett: What information are the Government collecting on academies' individual policies in order to understand what makes certain academies very successful, and then spread best practice to others?

Edward Balls: It is important for us to do that. What we know from our education system is that strong leadership, great teachers, a motivating curriculum and a culture of aspiration are key ingredients in schools. The reason why, in recent years, academies in some of the most deprived parts of our communities have achieved faster-rising results than the average is the strong leadership that they have established. However, I am keen to ensure that as we expand our academies programme in the coming years we do more to enable the lessons we have learnt from academies to be used in other parts of our school system. There is currently discussion of the possibility of one of the best head teachers in the state system, who works in a community school, moving to an academy in Leeds. Learning can go in both directions, but we must make use of it.

Kate Hoey: As the Secretary of State will know, a separate but linked aspect of the academy programme is studio schools, which are more vocation and business-oriented. There is a fund to be bid for, and a bid will be made by the Beaufort institute in my borough. Can the Secretary of State assure me that the money for studio schools will be separate from the money for Building Schools for the Future in the local authority?

Edward Balls: I can give my hon. Friend that assurance. We are currently discussing about six studio schools, which are a particular kind of school that brings the workplace into the school environment, and we will make sure that the funding is genuinely additional to the funding that is already going into the Building Schools for the Future programme in the areas that are chosen.

Building Schools for the Future

Ann Coffey: If he will make a statement on progress in the Building Schools for the Future programme.

Jim Knight: Following the selection of eight authorities for an accelerated start this summer, announced on 23 June, 80 local authorities are now engaged in BSF. With 13 BSF schools now open and 23 more to open in September, rising to 200 a year from 2011, there is real pace and momentum in the programme. We are consulting on the management of waves seven to 15, and we will announce details of when the remaining local authorities will join BSF when that process has concluded.

Ann Coffey: I represent one of the most deprived areas in Stockport and the UK, and the attainment of the young people in the area at GCSE grades A* to C is significantly worse than that of young people in other parts of the borough. The schools they attend need either rebuilding or extensive repairs. I hope that Stockport will bid for BSF capital, and I hope it will be successful, but does my hon. Friend agree that that bid is an opportunity for Stockport to bring forward proposals that will improve the attainment of young people in this particularly deprived area and enhance their life chances?

Jim Knight: I agree with my hon. Friend. She has been a hearty champion of the needs of the children she represents, and in particular their attainment and the relationship with the BSF programme. It is important that the Liberals, who run the council concerned, understand in submitting their strategy for change that it is more than a building programme; it is about educational transformation. While I cannot prejudge the outcome of the consultation, which closes this week, the proposals it contains include criteria additional to those of educational and social need in the prioritisation of projects, and ensuring that deliverability and readiness to deliver are important aspects of the new programme.

Andrew Turner: In what year is it anticipated that the Cowes high school on the Isle of Wight will be rebuilt?

Jim Knight: It is up to the hon. Gentleman's friends in the Isle of Wight council to come forward with the appropriate plans. We have increased tenfold the amount of capital allocation to local authorities. As I have just explained, we are currently consulting—that will finish this week—on the authorities that are in waves seven to 15 of the BSF programme. That includes the Isle of Wight. If it can put in a good enough proposal that meets the criteria that will be agreed around the turn of the year, and that includes Cowes high school, it is possible that the rebuilding could be moved forward.

Barry Sheerman: I ask my hon. Friend to remember that the Education and Skills Committee conducted a thorough inquiry into BSF. There was a Treasury examination of the programme at that time, which I think is still going on, but does he recall that the key recommendations we made were that the new buildings must be more sustainable in this age of climate change, and that new ways of teaching and learning needed far more research and implementation in these schools?

Jim Knight: I remember well the Select Committee inquiry that my hon. Friend chaired, and I am looking forward to returning to the Select Committee in due course to discuss the latest inquiry into BSF. Sustainability is important; all schools in BSF must meet the minimum environmental standard of BREEAM—Building Research Establishment environmental assessment method—"very good". We have released additional funding for 234 schools in BSF and the academies programme to support the implementation of energy efficiency and renewable energy measures in school sites to enable this requirement to be met, and we have a zero carbon task force which is looking to go beyond that. On teaching and learning, as I have said, this is an educational transformation programme, and not just a school building programme. How we can use the opportunities of a new environment to inform better teaching and learning is a fundamental part of what authorities need to consider when they submit their strategy for change.

Brian Jenkins: May I first say to my hon. Friend how pleased I and the people of Tamworth are that we are in one of the accelerated schemes, with up to £100 million being spent on our schools by our Labour Government? However, given that it is an accelerated scheme, he will appreciate that we had little time for consultation. Can he therefore give me, and my constituents, a guarantee that consultation will be meaningful and that if we come out at the end with a different model, that will be given full consideration if we have to change the original concept?

Jim Knight: It is certainly important that parents and local communities be consulted as authorities plan for and deliver the huge investment that the Government are putting into schools in my hon. Friend's constituency. I am very happy to discuss further with him his concerns about the current plans, if he needs to reflect them on his constituents' behalf.

Teacher Recruitment

Simon Hughes: What steps he has taken to recruit more teachers of (a) mathematics, (b) science and (c) modern foreign languages.

Jim Knight: There are significant financial incentives for students taking a postgraduate certificate of education in priority subjects and courses to improve subject knowledge in mathematics, physics and chemistry. Transition to Teaching will encourage more career changers to teach mathematics, science and information and communications technology. Teach First's expansion will allow more top graduates the opportunity to teach shortage subjects in challenging schools. We have trained 4,000 new primary teachers with a languages specialism to support the development of language teaching in primary schools, which is expanding fast.

Simon Hughes: That is a good general answer, but the Minister will know that a report published today states that we have a reduction by more than a quarter of applicants for teacher training in physics. We know that about 25 per cent. more physics teachers are already leaving the profession than are joining, that a quarter of all state schools have no qualified physics teacher, and that in the inner cities half have no such teacher. Is the only answer in the short and medium term that schools should now recruit abroad for the specialist teachers whom we need?

Jim Knight: I have seen the claims made by Professor Smithers this morning regarding the shortage of physics teachers. The combination of the higher bursary of £9,000 and a £5,000 golden hello when people start teaching will certainly help. The expansion—the doubling—of Teach First over the next five years, announced by the Prime Minister last week, will add to that. The £140 million investment in science, technology, engineering and maths, and the improvement that we are just starting to see in the take-up of physics A-level will be important. Over the medium to long term, I therefore certainly do not see it as a necessity for people to recruit physics teachers from abroad, but in the short term individual schools in local authorities will have to do what they need to do to ensure that we have the necessary specialisms in our classrooms.

David Chaytor: On foreign language teachers, does the Minister agree that it is not just a question of financial incentives, and that we have a much bigger cultural problem? As long as our national debate is dominated by anti-European and anti-foreigner sentiments—driven, it has to be said, by the Conservative party—there will always be a difficulty in recruiting modern foreign language teachers.

Jim Knight: We are focused on reducing the decline in language learning in secondary schools, which is why I was particularly pleased that on Thursday, we were able to publish statistics showing that the take-up of primary school pupils studying a language has gone up from 70 per cent. last year to 84 per cent. The figure was only 44 per cent. in 2002, so we are starting to make progress with younger children, who more easily take to learning a language, as part of addressing a decline over a number of years at secondary level.
	Such attitudes towards Europeans and other foreigners have, I hope, been compensated for by the excellent football that we have seen in the past couple of weeks in the European championship, and by people in all our communities joining other Europeans who live among us in celebrating their various teams. I was very pleased to see the result last night.

Nick Gibb: Does the Minister accept, however, the basic premise of today's report from the university of Buckingham on the supply of science and physics teachers, referred to by the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes): that the drive in schools towards general science at the expense of the three separate sciences—biology, chemistry and physics—is the underlying cause of the 10-year decline in the numbers taking A-level physics, which have fallen from 29,000 in 1997 to 24,000 last year? Only a quarter of comprehensive schools teach the three separate sciences. Does he agree with us that every child should be entitled to study the three separate sciences to GCSE, regardless of his or her performance at key stage 3 and regardless of the idiosyncrasies of particular school governing bodies?

Jim Knight: We certainly want every child who achieves level 6 in science at key stage 3 to be able to study the three separate sciences as an entitlement, and we are working with schools with science specialisms to deliver that. I am pleased that we are beginning to see an improvement in the numbers taking and achieving A-level physics, as well as maths and further maths, which are so closely allied to the study of physics. That is reversing the long-term trend away from science. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) mentioned an anti-foreigner culture: well, there is certainly an anti-science culture in much of our media. We need to address that head on and, perhaps through the science diploma, show people the exciting routes into a range of jobs that require maths and physics. For example, if people want to design computer games, they need A-level physics.

National Schools Challenge

Barbara Keeley: How many schools in Worsley are taking part in the national schools challenge.

Beverley Hughes: There are two schools in Worsley where fewer than 30 per cent. of pupils achieved five or more A* to C GCSE grades, including both English and mathematics, and are therefore part of the national challenge. The schools are already receiving bespoke support from the Greater Manchester challenge, which is aligned with the national challenge, to help them achieve this target by 2011 at the latest.

Barbara Keeley: Harrop Fold school in my constituency was already tackling the challenges, because attainment in maths on entry was only 24 per cent., compared with 48 per cent. in English, so it knew that it had some work to do. Under the excellent head teacher, Antony Edkins, it has had maths weekends, a weekly power hour and other super-learning days. Can the Minister assure me that the Government will do what they can to encourage and support schools in that situation as they work hard to meet the targets that have been set?

Beverley Hughes: Like my hon. Friend, I welcome the improvements being made at Harrop Fold school, thanks to the hard work of the staff, the pupils and the parents. As she said, the results for those achieving five A* to C grades have improved significantly, from 24 per cent. to 47 per cent. Improvements in English and maths are still needed, but from what I know of the school I am confident that we will see even better results this summer and beyond. Certainly the Greater Manchester challenge will provide the school with the dedicated support that it needs to continue that upward trend.

Jeff Ennis: Many schools in challenging circumstances in Worsley and elsewhere are already offering students a mix of courses, including GCSEs and BTEC vocational courses. How will schools that are adopting that strategy be affected by the national schools challenge? I have concerns about that.

Beverley Hughes: We intend that the national challenge will give schools the opportunity to assess and diagnose, with expert assistance, the particular issues for each school. They will then be assisted in putting in place a package of support to address those issues. Schools that are trying to provide a wide range of options will get the support they need and BTEC courses will count as part of the challenge.

Secondary School Standards

Dari Taylor: What plans he has to raise secondary school standards in Stockton, South constituency.

Edward Balls: Secondary school standards have risen since 1997 and I am pleased to say that progress in Stockton, South has exceeded national rates of progress. The national challenge programme will ensure that, by 2011, every school will have at least 30 per cent. of its pupils achieving five or more GCSEs, including English and mathematics. That will include Thornaby community school in my hon. Friend's constituency.

Dari Taylor: I am grateful for my right hon. Friend's confidence and for his statement about Thornaby community school. My right hon. Friend met the school's competent and professional head teacher and deputy head teacher. My concern is about how, and in what way, they will benefit from the challenge fund. Will parents be included in whatever support level we could see being delivered? Most particularly, will the quality of teaching supply staff be affected?

Edward Balls: I enjoyed very much our meeting with Mrs. Russell-Bond, the head teacher at Thornaby community school. The school has seen its results for those with five GCSEs go from 28 per cent. to 39 per cent. in just one year, and the number including English and maths has gone from 12 per cent. to 18 per cent. I was impressed by her commitment and drive. I am sure that the school can get there, but she also made it clear to us that it will need extra help. Our £400 million is available to provide support for schools, including specialist teaching and learning support, but that support needs to be tailored to the context of the school. That is why, in the coming months, it is important that local authorities and schools, with our Department, work hard to ensure that schools get the support they need. We have also said that governing bodies and parents should be consulted. Our aim is to ensure that schools get the support that they need so that every parent can have a good school in their local area. We will support schools to meet that challenge.

Sure Start

Adam Holloway: What recent assessment he has made of the progress of the Sure Start programme.

Beverley Hughes: In March this year my Department published the latest findings from our rigorous national Sure Start evaluation. The report highlighted that living in a Sure Start local programme area is associated with a number of positive outcomes. Children living in those areas exhibited more positive social behaviour and greater independence and self-regulation, while parents made greater use of support services, exhibited less negative parenting and provided a better home learning environment.

Adam Holloway: Some childminders say that they want to provide home from home care but that they do not want to get completely bogged down in paperwork. What would the Minister say to them about that?

Beverley Hughes: That is rather remote from a question on Sure Start programmes, but none the less I shall try to make the links for the hon. Gentleman. It is very important that whatever setting a child is in—whether they are with a childminder, in a Sure Start centre, in a nursery, in a maintained school or in the reception class—parents and children can be assured of the highest- quality provision. That is why, through the early years foundation stage and a number of other measures, which include a great deal more training for childminders and the establishment of local childminding networks, we are supporting all childminders in doing what the best childminders are already doing—providing a caring but positive learning environment for young children.

Karen Buck: With new children's centres shortly opening in my constituency, may I say how much I welcome the Government's investment in Sure Start, even though, sadly, the Conservative local authority is always quick to claim the credit for the investment from the Government? Is my right hon. Friend aware that the mainstreaming of Sure Start, although it is to be welcomed in many ways, has led to some concern about a marginalisation of the role of the voluntary sector and parents? Will she look again at the guidance to local authorities on Sure Start to ensure that parents and voluntary organisations are in the leading position and are steering Sure Start delivery?

Beverley Hughes: I thank my hon. Friend for her question. She is quite right about some Conservative councillors. Indeed, some Conservative Members are still rather ambivalent about Sure Start. I was hoping to get the opportunity to thank the hon. Member for Gravesham (Mr. Holloway) for the praise for Sure Start on his website, which I welcome very much. As my hon. Friend said, some councils are quick to claim the credit although they are not necessarily supportive in practice.
	I have made it clear that I want all local authorities to work closely with the voluntary sector. I am pleased to say that about 74 per cent. of children's centres involve the voluntary sector in some way. We think that about 58 per cent. of centres have their child care provision run by the voluntary sector. Some local authorities, at least, are paying heed to that. I want to see more, because I think that the voluntary sector has an important role to play.

Maria Miller: Sure Start should be uniquely placed to help to support our country's most deprived children. That is why the Opposition support it. The Government's new departmental report, which perhaps has slightly more up-to-date information than that referred to by the Minister, shows that after spending £10 billion they have completely failed to reduce the achievement gap endured by children in the most deprived areas. Does the Minister not agree that Sure Start has to start delivering for the families and children who are most in need? Will she start by agreeing that outreach should be led by health visitors and reverse her announcement about cutting outreach levels in the most deprived areas by a third?

Beverley Hughes: We have been around this course before with the hon. Lady, and she is completely wrong. We have doubled the funding to ensure that in disadvantaged areas there will be two outreach workers in every children's centre. We are also revising and publishing guidance, because there is a great lack of clarity about what outreach should be and how best to provide it. Some health visitors provide it very well, but there is a role for other people to do that outreach work, particularly in the voluntary sector, as I have said. For many families—and particularly people who do not find it easy initially to take up services or be associated with them—there is less stigma attached to a voluntary sector worker visiting their home and trying to encourage them to join in.
	We are absolutely determined that the Sure Start programme should make the most difference to the most disadvantaged children. That is why we have given local authorities the duty to close the gap to which the hon. Lady referred. I hope that she will support us when we ask local authorities to collect data on what is happening with young children, to support the early years foundation stage. That is how we will make the necessary difference for the most disadvantaged children.

Hilary Armstrong: I congratulate my right hon. Friend and the Government on the improvements that are clearly coming through as a result of Sure Start. Does she agree that much of that improvement is down to more systematic and rigorous intervention with the most disadvantaged, so that they are brought to a level at which they really do stand a chance? Will she perhaps outline to the House just how the Government intend to develop that progress and roll it out in future?

Beverley Hughes: I agree completely with my right hon. Friend, who has done much to promote services for the youngest children, children generally and families. The Sure Start programme is just one of an array of measures. As she rightly says, the focus has to be on early intervention and prevention, so that we not only provide an excellent quality of environment for the child, but work closely with parents to help them improve their parenting skills—that includes fathers as well as mothers. Those are all ways in which we want to develop the Sure Start programme progressively over time, making sure that quality, outreach, support for parents and improving parenting skills are part of an early intervention approach.

Singing

Robert Flello: What plans he has to increase provision for singing in schools.

Kevin Brennan: rose—

Tim Loughton: He is going to sing the answer.

Kevin Brennan: I will turn down the hon. Gentleman's invitation.
	We want all children of primary school age to have the opportunity to engage in quality singing, and we are investing £40 million in Sing Up, the national singing programme spearheaded by Howard Goodall, our singing ambassador. Our aim is that by 2011 singing will be an integral part of the culture of every primary school in the country. Since the launch in November, 17,000 adults have received training directly through Sing Up, some 10,000 schools have signed up to the Sing Up website, which already contains more than 150 songs, and 100,000 children have experienced singing activity. I recommend the programme's magazine to Opposition Members. This morning, we were happy to greet pupils of St. Matthew's primary school, Westminster, who sang for us in the Department on our first birthday.

Robert Flello: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that answer. In Stoke-on-Trent, City Songbirds does a fantastic job, working with more than 500 young people across 24 schools. It uses song to help children develop key skills such as listening and self-confidence, as well as giving them the opportunity to use their voices and show their talent. Will my right hon. and hon. Friends join me in congratulating Stoke-on-Trent city council—it is unusual for me to say that—on its work with City Songbirds, as well as the City Songbirds' hard-working staff and dedicated volunteers, and indeed the songbirds themselves?

Kevin Brennan: Yes, I should like to take this opportunity to congratulate everybody in Stoke who works on the project. I know that my hon. Friend recently attended a concert given by City Songbirds, which is a locally funded programme. We very much hope that the national Sing Up programme that I mentioned will help to maintain and build on the momentum behind singing in Stoke's schools. I would also like to take this opportunity to wish my daughter good luck in her school musical tonight.

Nicholas Winterton: Well done to the Minister. On Saturday night I attended a concert organised by the Macclesfield and district lions club, in aid of the Stroke Association and SightFirst, the club's own charity. Part of the programme was presented by the young children of the Prestbury Church of England primary school. They were wonderful. Young boys and girls came together to sing in the most delightful way. The programme was hugely well received by the big audience. What is the Minister doing to ensure that there are enough music and singing teachers available to ensure that standard of singing and music, which is so important?

Kevin Brennan: I presume that they sang "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" if they sang in the most delightful way, as the hon. Gentleman said. We are investing £332 million in music education from 2007 to 2011, including £40 million specifically for the Sing Up programme, which includes the training of teachers to help children to learn and experience the joys of singing.

David Taylor: I have the privilege of serving as the president of the Coalville festival of music, which every year organises a competition, including a category for school choirs, which Hugglescote school won this year. Is that not a way ahead: to encourage more competition in the locality to produce more singers at primary school level? For an appropriate answer to my question, I am quite happy to provide the Minister with a tenor.

Kevin Brennan: My hon. Friend and I do not always sing from the same song sheet, but—

Michael Gove: You are in harmony.

Kevin Brennan: On this occasion we are in harmony, as the hon. Gentleman says.
	I agree that competition has its place, but it is not the only thing that we should worry about. Coming from south Wales as I do, I might add that the Eisteddfod provides a good model; perhaps it could be copied more in England.

Angela Watkinson: I welcome the Minister's encouraging words and invite him to congratulate Havering music school, which nurtures musical talent among the borough's pupils, on including the category of voice in its annual competition, so that singers have an equal chance with players of musical instruments to become Havering musician of the year.

Kevin Brennan: That is a wonderful initiative, and I will not try the House's patience any further with more puns.

National Schools Challenge

Helen Jones: What support will be available to schools included in the national schools challenge; and if he will make a statement.

Edward Balls: We are investing £400 million in the national challenge in the next three years. All schools will benefit from an adviser and special tailored support. We will also be able to fund an additional 70 academies and national challenge trusts for schools most at risk of missing the target. Funding for schools needs to meet the individual circumstances of the school and will be discussed with my Department and the local authority in the coming weeks.

Helen Jones: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that answer, but can he reassure me that his Department will carefully scrutinise the plans produced by local authorities and keep monitoring them to make sure that that level of support continues, and not allow authorities to hide behind saying, as officers told me last week, that their overall results are very good, thereby ignoring huge educational disparities across the borough?

Edward Balls: I can give my hon. Friend that assurance. The national challenge is a challenge school by school. We are determined to make sure that every school gets the support that it needs, and we are asking local authorities to submit plans which we will scrutinise in detail in the coming weeks. This is a challenge for individual schools, but it is also a challenge for local authorities around the country. It is important that they play their part to make sure that we meet the challenge. We have made it clear that, where we do not get satisfactory plans and engagement, we will go back to those local authorities with advice and support. In the end, however, we will take action if we do not think that there is sufficient engagement. I hope that that is not what happens in Warrington and that we can move forward together.

Annette Brooke: In what ways can the Secretary of State encourage grammar schools to support secondary modern schools in the same local authority if those secondary modern schools, not surprisingly, happen to have fallen into the national schools challenge? If a grammar school has trust status, would that present any obstacles to that support?

Edward Balls: Trust status will prove no obstacle at all. About 40 per cent. of secondary moderns are in that category, which means that 60 per cent. are not. For that 40 per cent., we will give extra support and help. Teaming up with another secondary modern is often the best way to get help and support, but if that can be done in partnership with grammar schools, it will be welcomed by the Department. Indeed, it has already happened in Kent, where the Skinners school is working closely and teaming up with Tunbridge Wells high school precisely to drive up standards and to use best practice and learning and support between the two schools.
	We are clear that if grammar schools can play that role they will have our full support. What we do not support is there being more grammar schools. That is something on which I can make a commitment but the Opposition cannot at this time.

Training

Adrian Bailey: How many 16 and 17-year-olds in Sandwell are in education or work-based training.

Beverley Hughes: The most recent estimates of education and work-based learning at the local authority level relate to the end of 2006, when in Sandwell 80 per cent. of 16 and 17-year-olds were participating in education and in work-based learning.

Adrian Bailey: I thank the Minister for her reply. In 2006, a relatively high number of young people not in education, employment or training—NEETs—were identified in Sandwell. Will the Minister tell us just what is being done to tackle that problem?

Beverley Hughes: In addition to the national figures, we also produce local estimates from Connexions data, and the latest data show that the proportion of young people who are NEETs in Sandwell fell from the 2006 figures that I mentioned to 12.3 per cent. in 2007. The fall is a result of the September guarantee and a raft of other measures. We are working on them with Sandwell and with a number of other local authorities to reduce the NEET figures, and the measures are showing results. The national figures for 2007, which we released this month, show the highest ever proportion of young people aged 16 to 18 participating in education or training and the lowest proportion of NEETs for some eight years. I expect Sandwell's 2007 confirmed results to reflect those very welcome trends.

Topical Questions

Norman Baker: If the Secretary of State will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

Edward Balls: My right hon. Friend the Minister for Children, Young People and Families has today issued a written statement on the early years foundation stage. In that statement, she has asked Sir Jim Rose to review the literacy goals for five-year-olds as part of his review of the primary curriculum. The small number of parents and child care workers who feel that some specific parts of the EYFS are incompatible with their philosophy will now be able to apply for a time-limited exemption ahead of a review of all early years foundation stages in 2010.
	The Minister for Schools and Learners has also issued a written statement today, in which he set out a further package of support for the delivery of our new diplomas, including £23 million to help pupils from rural schools to travel in order to access diplomas, and to provide fair arrangements between independent schools and other schools, colleges and local authorities in consortiums.
	I am also pleased to announce that as we take forward our three general diplomas in science, the humanities and languages, about 40 employers have already engaged with them, including AstraZeneca, ITN, G & J Seddon, Lovell, Kier Group, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, the national health service, the Eden Project and the Victoria and Albert museum.
	Finally, today I placed in the Library a copy of a letter that I sent to the Community Security Trust after it raised concerns that Jewish schools are finding it more difficult than they should to access capital funding for security. In that letter, I confirmed that if the trust can provide evidence that the current system is not working, I shall consider whether there is a case for a different system of central or targeted funding, so that all parents can know that their children are safe at school.

Norman Baker: In one instance in a school in my constituency, a little girl who fell over and injured herself in the playground was clearly distressed, but the teacher felt unable to put her arm around her and comfort her as she would have liked to have done. In a second instance, a disruptive pupil went under a desk, disrupting the class entirely, but the teacher did not feel able to intervene until one of the parents had been summoned, which took a couple of hours. Is it not time that we had some common sense in our schools, that we gave some support to our teachers and that we stopped the effective ban on teachers ever touching children?

Edward Balls: The common-sense thing would be for the hon. Gentleman to advise that school that there is no reason at all not to provide such comfort and support—whether the issue is about reasonable restraint or comfort. Of course teachers should be comforting children. Rather than raise the matter with me, the hon. Gentleman should go back to the school and tell its staff that they should have given that comfort and that they should do so in future.

Ben Chapman: Given that citizenship education has the power to tackle issues such as diversity, shared values, ethnicity and community cohesion, is the Minister content that Ofsted's previously expressed worries have been addressed, that its recommendations for better citizenship education have been put into effect and that the issue is being addressed within and without the classroom?

Jim Knight: My hon. Friend will be aware that we asked Sir Keith Ajegbo to carry out a review of citizenship education, and we are implementing the outcome of that review to improve the standard of citizenship teaching and learning. My hon. Friend will be pleased to know that last week was "Who do we think we are?" week, which was an opportunity for more than 500 schools across the country to explore their roots and to celebrate them collectively, as recommended by Sir Keith. I visited excellent examples of that in Bradford, at Guru Nanak secondary school in west London, and when I went back to my very first primary school, Brooklands primary school in Greenwich.

Michael Gove: The Government are reducing the amount of literature in GCSE English so that it makes up only 20 per cent. of the examination. One of the questions in the 2006 GCSE English exam was:
	"Describe the room you're sitting in."
	The chief examiner of GCSE English decreed that pupils who began their answer with a swear word—"Expletive off"—should get 7.5 per cent. of the available marks. If they added an exclamation mark, they would get 11 per cent. Does the Secretary of State believe that we drive up standards in English by downgrading the importance of literature and rewarding the use of bad language?

Edward Balls: It is clear to me that in this particular case the exam board, AQA, and the Joint Council for Qualifications have already responded by saying that examiners are required to report the use of "inappropriate" material in exam papers and that that could lead to a loss of marks or disqualification. The report that the hon. Gentleman read may have been wrong. Of course it is important that we have creativity in our curriculum, but it does not need to go that far. The people at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority board and Ofqual are there to mark the exams and then drive up standards. It is for them to ensure not only that the proper standards are in place but that there is proper monitoring of examinations and boards. In this case, the QCA board made it clear that this was inappropriate and would be marked down, so I think that the hon. Gentleman has got his facts wrong.

Michael Gove: I am grateful for that qualification and for that rebuke to the chief examiner, who has been quoted today. It is also interesting that the use of such language is considered creative by a Government Minister.
	In this year's key stage 3 science examination, pupils were asked the following questions: if a star-shaped fossil is found, could it be the remains of a snail, a slug, a ladybird or a starfish?; where does the power come from for a solar-powered mole scarer?; and what part of the rider's anatomy does a riding hat protect? Given that it is possible to secure a good pass—a level 5—in key stage 3 examinations having got just one third of the answers correct, is the Minister satisfied that he is providing a rigorous scientific education for 14-year-olds?

Edward Balls: We are entirely clear that we are providing a rigorous system of examinations. Standards are rising because we have the best teachers we have ever had, and we can give that assurance because we have Ofqual in place to ensure that standards are being raised in a consistent way across the country. The questions that the hon. Gentleman mentions are very interesting, but I have no more idea what the answers are than he does—perhaps we should discuss that afterwards.

Tom Levitt: Thornsett school is a splendid small primary school in my constituency. We have recently managed to get Derbyshire county council to place it on the list of schools that are due for replacement, but it was quite a job to get it on the list, because although it has inadequate staff facilities, very poor access up steep steps on to the road, and half the playground taken up by a temporary classroom, we are advised that it does not meet other criteria on the Department's list. Will my hon. Friend look sympathetically at the Derbyshire list, particularly as regards Thornsett school, whose Victorian buildings need replacing?

Jim Knight: I will certainly look sympathetically, in so far as I am asked to, at the local authority's plans in respect of Thornsett. I am looking forward to visiting my hon. Friend's constituency, at his insistence, later this month, when perhaps I can discuss it a little further.

Henry Bellingham: Further to the question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), does the Secretary of State believe that pupils should be awarded marks for writing expletives on exam papers? Did he see the article in  The Times that found that pupils were being rewarded in exams for writing obscenities? It said:
	"One pupil who wrote 'f*** off' was given marks for accurate spelling and conveying a meaning successfully."
	Is that not a complete farce?

Edward Balls: As I made clear, it is possible to be marked down for expletives, as well as for not listening in class. It is pretty clear that that is what the hon. Gentleman has been doing, because I answered that question a moment ago.

Katy Clark: My hon. Friend will be aware that in the past decade 64 teenagers have died in the workplace and there have been nearly 15,000 injuries. Could he outline what his Department is doing to ensure that health and safety are taught in the workplace and we can reduce the number of avoidable injuries and deaths?

Jim Knight: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her question. In 2002, the Department issued guidance to schools in England on the teaching of health and safety in school as part of personal, social and health education. We are looking to deepen the quality of the teaching in that subject through a new PSHE subject association. Where appropriate, health and safety are taught in other subjects, such as science, in the context of carrying out experiments.

David Laws: I invite the Secretary of State to congratulate his predecessor, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull, West and Hessle (Alan Johnson), who is now Health Secretary, on his remarkable wisdom and foresight in March 2007, when he predicted that the new diploma system could go horribly wrong. Now that the Health Secretary has been proved right, will the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families consider scrapping the complex 17 diploma system, which is clearly not working effectively? Will he consider replacing it with a general diploma that will build on existing qualifications?

Edward Balls: It is the hon. Gentleman who has got it horribly wrong. That was not what was said by my right hon. Friend, if I remember correctly. The fact is that our diploma programme is going from strength to strength, and we will continue to take it forward. The vice-president of AstraZeneca said just today:
	"We believe strongly that the Diploma's ethos of applied learning, far from being a distraction as the CBI suggests, will in fact have a real and positive effect in boosting the numbers of young people studying key subjects like science and languages" .
	There is another very important quote:
	"An over-arching diploma which brings together academic and vocational training into one single diploma which we support...I think would help end this historic gap and this deeply damaging gap between academic qualifications and vocational training."
	I agree with the shadow Chancellor; it is a pity that the shadow Secretary of State does not.

Stephen Ladyman: There was a great deal of anger in my constituency when the local media portrayed eight of our local secondary schools as falling short of the national school challenge target. In a selective area, where 25 per cent. of the kids are creamed off and sent to grammar schools, it is extremely difficult to meet that target, no matter how good a school is. Will my right hon. Friend give the head teachers involved an assurance that when the time for judgment comes, they will be judged on added value and the quality of teaching in those schools?

Edward Balls: My hon. Friend is quite right. Many high-performing schools that are in the national challenge category will get through the 30 per cent. threshold comfortably. They have our full support, but they are not failing schools at all. It is true that secondary moderns face greater challenges, which is why they need extra support. I have said that we will give extra support to secondary moderns to ensure that they overcome the extra barriers they face because of selection. It is also true that the majority of secondary modern schools are already above the 30 per cent. threshold. We will work with them, use their experience and expertise and, in some cases, partner them with other national challenge schools so that we can ensure that every school and every child gets what every parent wants—a good local school. We will ensure that the extra support is there, and that schools have our full support.

John Barrett: The Secretary of State may be aware that 15 October is global hand-washing day. Given that effective hand-washing has proved to be the most effective prevention of the spread of many infections and diseases, what is his Department doing to mark the day and to ensure that effective hand-washing practices are implemented in the home and at school?

Edward Balls: As part of my departmental duties involving child safety, on Friday I visited the burns unit at Pinderfields hospital in my constituency, to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the NHS. I am pleased to say that I washed my hands on the way in, while I was on the ward and on the way out—at least three different times. This Department is hand-washing to ensure that we tackle any problems of lack of hygiene in wards, so that children are safe from burns in my constituency, and in constituencies throughout the country.

Anne Moffat: May I ask my right hon. Friend what plans there are to increase apprenticeships for 16 and 17-year-olds? Surely that group of young people will be the lifeblood of the future of our skilled work force.

Beverley Hughes: I agree with that. We announced in our document "World-class Apprenticeships" our plans to improve the quality and expand the number and range of apprenticeships for young people. We are introducing an entitlement to an apprenticeship place for all suitably qualified young people who want one, and our ambition is that one in five of all young people will be an apprentice. The expansion of apprenticeships will support our plans to raise the age of participation in learning, so it is a very important part of our planning.

Mark Lancaster: Shortly before the last general election the Prime Minister, who was then the Chancellor, visited Walton high school in my constituency to bask in the reflected glory of a successful, expanding school. The Government claim to support such schools with demand-led funding via the Learning and Skills Council. However, Walton high wants to educate 360 pupils next year but has just been told that it will get funding for only 300. It has the demand, so why not the funding?

Jim Knight: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will take up that issue with Milton Keynes council, which is responsible for school place planning in his constituency. In the past few weeks, we have awarded an extra £28 million of capital funding to Milton Keynes council as part of the basic need safety valve, to cope with the expansion of demand in Milton Keynes. I hope that the Liberals on the council will engage with the hon. Gentleman and deliver on the needs of his constituents.

Vincent Cable: Will the Minister confirm that when the Government make high-profile pronouncements on new capital funding, a large number of councils on the grant floor are excluded from the programme because they are restricted to supported borrowing, which does not carry with it supported revenue?

Jim Knight: There are some technical issues in relation to that matter. We have come to expect the hon. Gentleman to raise such technical matters. The big picture should not be forgotten: that we have increased tenfold in real terms the amount of money that we are delegating to local authorities to spend on schools capital, even in Richmond upon Thames, and all to the benefit of his constituents.

NHS Next Stage Review

Alan Johnson: With permission, I would like to make a statement on the final report of the NHS next stage review and the first NHS constitution. Before I do, I should like to pay tribute to my noble Friend Lord Darzi of Denham, who has led the process. He has done so magnificently, bringing to bear his invaluable professional experience and expertise. I thank him and the thousands of front-line clinicians who have shaped and formed the conclusions of his review.
	As we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the NHS this week, it is befitting that we should acknowledge its successes, secure its strengths and chart a path for its future. Created by fraternity to take the place of fear, the founding principle of the NHS was as clear as it has been enduring: that access to health care should be determined by clinical need rather than the ability to pay. The NHS has been a friend to millions, sharing their joy and comforting their sorrow. Today, the service sees or treats a million people every 36 hours, eight out of 10 people see their family doctor every year and a million more operations a year are performed than 10 years ago.
	Then, the NHS was suffering from chronic under-investment. The challenges were too few doctors and nurses, poor equipment and crumbling infrastructure. Patients waited months, if not years, for treatment; waited weeks, not days, to see their GP; and measured their time waiting in accident and emergency in days and nights rather than in hours. A service whose promise was fair access for all had witnessed patients dying before they could even receive its care.
	This Government resuscitated the NHS and reaffirmed its principles. Today, patients wait no more than four hours in accident and emergency, and by the end of the year they will be able to go from referral by their GP to treatment—with all the diagnostic tests in between—in no more than 18 weeks, and normally in nine. There have been considerable improvements in the quality of care received by patients and delivered by NHS staff. The improvements for cancer and heart disease alone have saved nearly a quarter of a million lives in the past 11 years. The NHS is now able to deliver the highest quality of care in many medical disciplines and settings.
	The report published today heralds the next stage for the NHS: to deliver the highest quality care for all. It is underpinned by the service's first constitution, which will empower patients by clearly articulating their many rights, bringing transparency to decision making, and securing its founding principles for generations to come.
	The review has been led by front-line clinicians in every NHS region. Seventy-four local clinical working groups, made up of some 2,000 doctors, nurses and other staff working in health and social care organisations, have developed improved models of care for their communities, from maternity and new-born to end-of-life. They are based firmly on the best available clinical evidence and extensive engagement to ensure that they reflect the needs and preferences of local people.
	In common with all health systems around the globe, the NHS faces some significant challenges: ever higher expectations; greater demand driven by demographics; the transformational power of better information; the changing nature of disease and treatment; and rising expectations of the health workplace. The report puts the NHS on the front foot, seizing the opportunities that those challenges present, rather than simply reacting to their consequences.
	Meeting those challenges demands that the NHS do more to help people stay healthy and to give them more information, choice and control over their health and health care. Every primary care trust will now commission comprehensive well-being and prevention services to meet the specific needs of their local populations.
	Preventing vascular conditions such as diabetes, stroke and coronary heart disease has the potential to save thousands of lives. Today, some 4.5 million people are afflicted by vascular conditions, accounting for more than 170,000 deaths every year. We will launch a new Reduce Your Risk campaign to raise awareness and understanding as a precursor to the national vascular screening programme for everyone aged 40 to 74 that will begin next year.
	Improving the health of individuals and families will become an increasing focus for GPs. We will work with professionals and patient groups to improve the world-leading quality and outcomes framework to develop better incentives for maintaining good health as well as providing good care.
	As much as the NHS will do more to help people to stay healthy, it will also become a service that responds more rapidly and effectively to the people who use it. Patients will be given more rights and control over their health and care. They will have greater choice of GP practices, with better information to make the best choices for themselves and their families. That will be delivered by a fairer funding system that gives better rewards to GPs who provide responsive, accessible and high-quality services. Choice will not simply be a policy of Government but a right secured for all through the first NHS constitution.
	The constitution will guarantee patients access to drugs and treatments approved by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. We will give greater support to NICE to increase the speed of its appraisals process so that new guidance is consistently issued more quickly. Primary care trusts will have a new duty to provide transparency in their decisions and clear explanations to the public. Those measures proclaim an end to the postcode lottery in NICE-approved drugs and treatments.
	The rights will be accompanied by more personal control for patients, harnessing their ingenuity to improve their health and care. Every patient with a long-term condition will be offered a personalised care plan, jointly agreed by the patient and a named professional, so that services are organised around the needs of individuals. For the first time, we will pilot personal health budgets that give individuals and families the fullest control over their care.
	All the measures announced here today are designed to improve the quality of care that patients receive. It is essential that quality is understood from a patient's perspective. The measures pay regard to experiences as much as effectiveness, with safety as a given. Patients want to be treated in environments that are safe and clean, and to be shown respect and regard, compassion and kindness. The highest clinical quality can be undermined by letting the simple things slip.
	We must have an unwavering, unrelenting and unprecedented focus on quality. Our approach will be dedicated and disciplined, putting quality at the heart of everything that the NHS does. We will begin by bringing clarity to quality, ending the daunting and frustrating confusion that is caused by the morass of standards. NICE will be transformed to select the best available standards, fill the gaps and establish a new NHS evidence service, which will ensure that best practice readily flows to the front line.
	We can only be sure to improve what we can measure. Information can unlock local innovation by showing clinical teams where their greatest opportunities lie. We will create a national quality framework, so that every provider of NHS services systematically measures, analyses and improves its performance. Front-line teams will be supported by a new set of graphically illustrated quality measures that will inform the daily decisions that lead to improvement, known as a clinical dashboard.  [ Interruption. ] I did not invent the title; clinicians did.
	The power of information will be provided to the public. We will legislate so that all providers of NHS services will be required by law to publish quality accounts, just as they publish financial accounts, which will detail the quality of care that they provide for each and every service, and easy-to-understand comparative information will be made available online. For the first time, improvements to quality will be recognised and rewarded. Patients' own assessments of the success of their treatment and the quality of their experiences will have a direct impact on payments.
	We will harness the expertise and experience of clinicians, to raise standards by ensuring strong clinical involvement at every level of the NHS. New medical directors will be appointed to join existing nursing directors in every NHS region. They will be supported by clinical advisory groups to sustain and support the strong clinical voice elevated through the review. Nationally, a new quality board will be formed to provide leadership, advise Ministers on top clinical priorities for standard setting and make an annual report on the state of quality in England compared with that of international peers. There will be strong safeguards for quality, with no hiding place for those who fail to get the basics right on issues such as infection. I have already announced that the Care Quality Commission will have tough new enforcement powers to tackle infections and other lapses in patient care.
	Finally, we know that health care works at the edge of science, constantly creating new ways to cure and care for patients. The NHS has long been a pioneer, but too often too few NHS patients have benefited. We will create an environment in which excellence and innovation can flourish. That is why the report heralds new partnerships between the NHS, universities and industry to achieve the very best care for patients. This ambitious agenda to improve quality for patients can succeed only by unlocking the talents of the front line. We will ensure that NHS staff have the freedom to focus on quality, empowering them to improve services.
	Clinicians have abilities that go beyond clinical practice alone. Our new expectations of professionalism redefine their role as practitioners, partners and leaders in and of the NHS. We will unlock clinicians' creativity and innovation, give greater responsibility for the stewardship of resources and proclaim a new obligation to lead change where the evidence shows that it will improve quality.
	These noble objectives will be supported by pragmatic action. Our journey of setting the front line free from central direction will continue, our commitment to foundation trusts remains strong and we will extend similar freedoms to community services. We will free up their talents by introducing a right to request to set up a social enterprise. All primary care trusts will have an obligation to consider these requests, and staff choosing to join such organisations and continuing to care for NHS patients will be able to retain their NHS pensions.
	With greater freedom will come a newly enhanced accountability. The report sets no new targets; our approach will be openness on the quality of outcomes achieved for patients, meaning accountability for the whole patient pathway, from beginning to end. NHS staff are the service's most precious asset. We will more clearly illuminate how highly we value them by making new pledges to all staff in the NHS constitution: on work and well-being; on learning and development; and on involvement and partnership. All NHS organisations will have a statutory duty to have regard to the constitution.
	Furthermore, the system for education and training will be reformed by working in partnership with the professions. We will open a new chapter in our relationship with the medical profession by establishing Medical Education England. We will increase our investment in nurse preceptorships threefold, so that newly qualified nurses will be given more time to learn from their senior colleagues. We will pay higher regard to the contribution of non-clinical staff—the porters, administrators and others who are the backbone of the service—by doubling our investment in apprenticeships, and we will strengthen arrangements for learning and development so that all staff have access to the opportunities that they need to update and enhance their skills. Following today's publication of the final Next Stage Review report, we will over the course of this week publish supporting documents that set out in more detail our proposals on primary and community care, for the work force and for informatics.
	Finally, let me turn to the first NHS constitution. The changes outlined by the review will improve quality, but the best of the NHS—its enduring principles and values, and its defining rights and responsibilities—must be protected for generations to come. Patients and the public should be empowered by the clear expression of their rights in relation to the NHS, and the value of staff should be fully recognised. Decision making should be transparent and accountability strengthened. It is right and proper that a national health service, funded by national taxation, should remain accountable in and to Parliament. These goals are accomplished by our draft constitution, which we will publish for consultation today.
	Our proposal is to legislate so that all NHS bodies, and independent and third sector providers of NHS services, must take account of the constitution in their decisions and in their actions. The Government will be required to renew the constitution every 10 years, involving the patients who use it, the public who fund it, and the staff who work in it. No Government will be able to erode or undo the fundamental basis of the NHS without the consent of the people's elected representatives.
	Safe in the knowledge that the best of the NHS shall not perish, we will pursue our ambition to deliver the highest-quality care to all—not in some respects, not in many respects, but in all respects. On its 60th anniversary, after a decade of investment the NHS has the most talented array of staff in its history, united in their ambition. High-quality care for all is now within our reach. The report charts a path towards its achievement, and I commend it to the House.

Andrew Lansley: The 60th anniversary is a time to thank the staff of the service. It is a moment at which we should reiterate the values of the NHS, which command support on both sides of the House. We should also ensure that the NHS is fit for purpose in the 21st century. This is an opportunity to show vision and leadership for the NHS. It is a chance to create an NHS that is genuinely patient-centred and evidence-based.
	Regrettably, however, the work of the clinical pathway groups around the country has been overlaid by a continued bureaucratic, top-down system. In place of vision, we get another list of initiatives: some old, some new, some borrowed, and quite a lot of them blue. The vision should be that we raise the quality of health care in this country so that it becomes among the best in Europe. Our cancer survival rates are below the European average, our mortality rates from heart disease and stroke are above it, and our lung disease mortality rates are truly shocking. While focusing on that vision and holding the NHS to account for patient outcomes, we must at the same time set the NHS free from distorting top-down process targets.
	The Secretary of State, however, is confused. He says that there will be more outcome measurements, but no new targets—yet he clings to all the existing targets, and the policy will not work unless it is geared to outcomes. If managers are still geared to targets, they will continue to distort clinical decisions in pursuit of them. If the Secretary of State does not propose to scrap the targets, how can we believe that the outcome measurement will drive the policy? Yet he says nothing about scrapping those targets. Clearly, other parts of the Blairite agenda have been dropped, as there is nothing in the statement about practice-based commissioning, foundation trusts or independent sector treatment centres. If they are all on the back-burner and the Blairite agenda has gone, why does the Secretary of State cling to targets?
	The Government have followed our lead in proposing an NHS constitution, but where in that is the incorporation of NHS values? Why have two of the NHS principles set out in the NHS plan—continuity in respect of those principles would help the NHS—gone missing, including the principle that the NHS will support and value its staff? If it is a real constitution, where are the definitions and duties of NHS bodies; and where is the operational autonomy and independent regulation so essential to a more autonomous and patient-centred service? A constitution needs to be more than a patients charter, important as such patients' rights are. If the NHS continues legally to be whatever the Secretary of State decides it is, the power will still live in the Department of Health, which is clearly what the Department of Health intends.
	Will the Secretary of State look again not so much at these documents today, but at the performance regime document that he published last month? It describes strategic health authorities as
	"the local headquarters of the NHS"
	and it gives them power to control their areas. We can see what that means, as the Darzi review document proposed 21 new bodies at a regional level for the East of England SHA. The Secretary of State talks about local decision making, so will he stop the regionalisation of the NHS and the growth of a new regional bureaucracy on top of everything else?
	The Secretary of State proposes to create Medical Education England, but he views it as an advisory body, not as the body responsible for commissioning medical education and training to meet work force needs, as agreed between health care employers and staff. The real power of commissioning is given to—guess who—the strategic health authorities. The plan claims to be bottom-up, so will the Secretary of State abandon the top-down insistence on polyclinics and let the local NHS decide how primary care services are best provided? How can the Secretary of State talk about GP access and then want to shut down local and accessible GP surgeries? Clinicians care about continuity of care, so why do the Government undermine it?
	On health care-associated infections, where is the zero-tolerance strategy that patients are demanding? If the South East Coast SHA can pledge in its Darzi review that there will be no avoidable cases of hospital-acquired MRSA by 2011, why cannot others? Why are C. difficile rates in the UK 10 times those of other health economies?
	Apparently, the Government are claiming that they will promote home births. How can that be so when 15 local maternity units have been closed or have lost their obstetric service and 26 more are threatened? The simple fact is that if obstetric care is taken further away, home births or birth centres simply cannot be offered.
	The Secretary of State has followed our lead in a number of areas: extending personal budgets to include some patients with long-term conditions; enabling palliative care patients to choose where their care is provided; and publishing more data on outcomes reported by patients. Let us be clear about outcome measurement. Mortality rates for hip replacements are of limited value. Patient-reported outcomes need to extend to subsequent information on mobility, return to work, ability to look after oneself and absence of pain. Narrow outcome measures are only a little better than narrow targets.
	The Secretary of State said nothing about public health services. Obesity, binge drinking, drug misuse and resurgent infections threaten our health and the future of the NHS. Health inequalities are widening. Improving public health is critical to long-term health outcomes and the ability of the NHS to meet demands successfully. The lack of preventive action is a scandal, yet no response in today's statement is remotely proportionate to the challenge.
	The Secretary of State also now says that patients will not be subject to a postcode lottery. How often have Members heard that? Time and again. In reality, there is nothing new in what he announced today. It is already the case that primary care trusts should not refuse access to drugs on cost grounds alone while awaiting evaluation from NICE. If NICE approves a drug, they are already obliged to make it available within the NHS within three months. Last year, the Government promised to speed up NICE evaluations, yet today we are still among the countries with the slowest uptake of new medicines, despite being world leaders in research.
	We thank all those who have contributed to the review. The local clinical work will be valuable, but we must regret the fact that the Government appear unable to recognise that quality in the NHS depends on responding to patients' needs and expectations, the exercise of choice within a competitive environment, the freedom to innovate and a focus on the importance of outcomes for patients. It does not require—indeed, it will be impeded by—top-down process targets, excessive bureaucracy, incoherent policies and a command-and-control approach.
	Modern health care demands that we free the NHS to deliver outcomes and quality for patients. That is the best diamond jubilee gift we could give to the NHS.

Alan Johnson: I am very disappointed by that response, particularly as so many clinicians—not just the 2,000 who have been working with Lord Ara Darzi, but 60,000—have had an input into this. Those visions, for which today's final report from Ara Darzi is the enabling report, were developed locally, not dreamed up in a strategic health authority. The hon. Gentleman attacks it on the basis that there is too much top-down bureaucracy—

Anne Milton: There is too much.

Alan Johnson: The hon. Lady says that there is, but this is an example of our having freed up clinicians and people working in the health service, patients and carers, the staff and the public to set out their framework for the future.
	The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) says that we should scrap the targets. The position of Conservative Members is that there should be no greater access to GP surgeries, no 18-week maximum wait for surgery and no maximum of four hours in A and E. He mentioned the patients charter. I have the patients charter in front of me. What does it refer to? This, after 16 years of Conservative government:
	"For hip or knee replacements and cataract operations, a waiting time guarantee of 18 months".
	It was signed by Baroness Bottomley in 1995. What did the Conservatives go on to say? They said:
	"From April 1995, the NHS is broadening"
	this
	"to cover all admissions to hospital."
	 [Interruption.] The point is that we could have done with someone setting some targets, getting to grips with the issue, before we came into government, but that is the best that they could offer after 16 years in power— 18 months of waiting.
	The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire also said that we followed the Conservative lead on the constitution. I am sorry, but I have traced this back to a Fabian pamphlet produced by my right hon. Friend who is now the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport long before the ideas from the Opposition were put forward in relation to this independent NHS. They want the NHS to be a giant unelected quango—an idea that was ridiculed again this week by  The Lancet, as well as by the King's Fund and every other organisation that has looked into it.
	The hon. Gentleman then said that we should have bottom-up solutions. Polyclinics were developed in London by London clinicians, in a part of the world where 54 per cent. of GPs are either single or double-handed, where a third of all practices do not even have disabled access and where 50 per cent. of A and E cases involve people who should be in primary care.
	The Opposition reject a local solution enabling GPs to come together in services that can provide diagnostics, blood tests and X-rays, or to stay in their own services while being linked through a hub-and-spoke system. It is preposterous that the Opposition should oppose a move envisaged by Bevan in 1948.
	The hon. Gentleman spoke of maternity units. For the first time in 40 years, we stood up for clinicians in Manchester who said that three large neonatal specialist units were needed at the expense of four other units in the area. That will save the lives of between 30 and 40 babies a year, and will cost an extra £60 million. The Opposition were first against it and then for it, but the reconfiguring of services means that clinicians are able to say "This is how best to improve patient care". Although the Opposition's response is disappointing, it will not stop us from working with clinicians, staff, patients and carers to improve the quality of care in the NHS.

Norman Lamb: I thank the Secretary of State for early sight of his statement. It contained much in terms of aspiration on which we can all agree—it refers to the pursuit of quality and prevention in health care, access to medicines and the importance of empowering patients—but the main issue is how those goals can be achieved. There was little, if anything, in the statement to suggest that the Government have learned that change cannot be dictated from Whitehall.
	I was given a copy of the original leaflet informing the public about the national health service back in 1948. It contains a section about health centres, which states:
	"Doctors may be accommodated there instead of in their own surgeries".
	I suppose that what goes around comes around, but is not the current imposition of GP-led health centres, or polyclinics, yet more evidence that the Government have not learned that this issue cannot be approached through command and control from Whitehall?
	The Secretary of State has previously acknowledged the democratic deficit and lack of accountability in the health service. He is still the only democratically accountable person in the service: nothing has changed as a result of his statement. Have they got to him, or does he still acknowledge the democratic deficit in the NHS?
	We strongly agree about the need to speed up access to drugs and to speed up the NICE process, but what about all the drugs already on the market that have not been NICE-approved? It seems to me that the postcode lottery will remain with a vengeance in the case of all the drugs that came on to the market before NICE existed. Does the report contain any proposals to examine the criteria that NICE applies in deciding whether to approve a drug? It is currently not possible to take into account the interests of carers and others in relation to dementia drugs, and despite a recommendation from the Select Committee on Health, there was nothing about that in the statement.
	As for the constitution, although I endorse the case for clarity on rights and responsibilities, will patients be given legally enforceable rights or is this a "motherhood and apple pie" statement of ultimately meaningless intent? What will be done, for example, to end the scandal of the mixed-sex wards that still exist in our hospitals, particularly in the mental health sector?
	I am very concerned about the lack of any reference to mental health in the statement. The Secretary of State will be aware of yesterday's devastating analysis of the state of mental health services by the new president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. The 18-week target is absolutely irrelevant to anyone with a mental health problem. Can it be right for this to continue? Is it not bizarre that patients will have a legal right to a drug to suppress their condition, but no right to the treatment that could cure them? Surely that is ridiculous.
	The statement also made no reference to tackling the health inequalities that scar our country to this day, and appear on many indices to be worsening. Is that no longer a priority for the Government? Surely if it were a priority, it would have been headlined in the statement.
	The statement contained much good rhetoric—and much good new Labour rhetoric, such as the reference to a "clinical dashboard". I was, at least, relieved that the Secretary of State denied any responsibility for that ludicrous concept. The proposals have good aspirations, but also some notable and serious omissions. One is left with the sense that, when the dust has settled, nothing much of significance will change.

Alan Johnson: The hon. Gentleman at least damns the proposals with faint praise. He is wrong about dictating from Whitehall. There has been an ongoing debate about that within the NHS for 60 years. The original concept of the NHS—this was also central to the debate within the Cabinet at the time between Morrison and Bevan—was that hospitals should be taken out of the control of local municipalities and charities. Bevan's vision for the national health service was one that, in a sense, needed to be driven from the centre. I accept, as we all do, that what we are discussing today is not simply a question of providing more autonomy, but of how we do that in a system that we might describe as one of subsidiarity, in which the centre still has a responsibility through elected politicians to ensure that, for instance, waiting times and health care-acquired infections are tackled and that pay is determined centrally. What the public said time and again as we went through this process is that, in terms of health, they are not as concerned about devolving to the local level as they are about ending the postcode lottery and of having a more uniform system from the centre. That is what the debate is about.
	The hon. Gentleman talked about accountability. In terms of the constitution—I think this is what he was referring to—we looked at whether we should impose greater accountability on primary care trusts. In the end, we decided that a lot is happening at the moment and we should not impose something from the centre, and I was delighted to discover that the Local Government Association—it set up a commission on which the right hon. Member for Charnwood (Mr. Dorrell), a previous Secretary of State, sat—came to the same conclusion. It said:
	"On balance, further restructuring of PCT boards or changes to"
	their
	"responsibilities...would be an unfortunate distraction and likely to do more harm than good in the short to medium term".
	We agree. That is not to say that what is happening in terms of accountability—foundation trust models, councillors sitting on the local board of the PCT—should not continue. We just should not impose something over the top from the centre.
	When the hon. Gentleman reads the document, he will see that it covers some of the matters he referred to, including the clinical dashboard—which I assure him surgeons and clinicians love, so those who wish to interfere with it, do so at their peril. He mentioned health inequalities. First, it is important to mention—as Professor Michael Marmot, the world-renowned expert on this, points out—that the health of everyone in the UK has got better. If the basis had been just the health of the poorest improving in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality, we would not just be closing a 10 per cent. gap, but we would have closed the gap completely since 1997; but, quite rightly, the health of other, more prosperous, groups has improved. We published the health inequalities strategy two weeks ago. There is a reference to the minimum practice income guarantee, which is important because that militates against health inequalities.
	On mental health, all the eight clinical pathways from maternity through to palliative care looked at mental health as well, and mental health also had its own group. Also, in all the 10 reports from each of the regions around the country, mental health is dealt with in terms of the right for people with long-term conditions to have a care plan, the right to get much better practice into local and community practice and the right for patients to be empowered over their own care. That applies to mental health as much as to any other form of illness.

Ronnie Campbell: I welcome the statement, but may I ask about the polyclinics and their relationship to general practitioners? In my area, they wrote an open letter to the local newspaper criticising the polyclinics. I think they are a pretty good idea, but how are we going to get the GPs to work with the polyclinics, because many people do not realise that they are private operators within the health service?

Alan Johnson: The hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) mentioned the 1948 leaflet that went through every door and that said that health centres would come eventually. They never did, either through lack of funding or professional opposition. What would really help would be to get away from the deliberate misconception about these centres. The first argument is that they will all have 25 GPs. They will not—they will have about five. The second argument is that people will have to leave their own GP to go there. Wrong—people can go to one of the GP-led health centres and still remain registered with their GP. The third argument is that they will all be run by private companies. Obviously, there is a tendering process and we want to see quality, particularly in under-doctored areas, where we are increasing the number of GPs to provide a proper service. However, we expect the vast majority to be run by GP consortiums. Once people see that all these dreadful distortions—in part, exaggerated by the Conservative party—are just not true and that we are increasing capacity, they will see that this is a frankly long overdue increase in capacity in primary care.

Iain Duncan Smith: One reason why people in my area of Waltham Forest are very resistant to any of these new plans is that, rather like many other people, they have just survived a "fit for the future" programme that was a disaster, in which the PCT managers rode roughshod over all the public's views and attempted to close down one of their hospitals. That was stopped eventually, such was the outcry, but they remain very sceptical about this.
	For example, people are told that, in north-east London, stroke centres will save lives, but we know now from clinicians that unless someone gets to a stroke centre within two hours and starts the treatment, it will have no further effect on them and they might as well be at their local hospital. Given the problem of diagnostics, is not the reality that this will not apply at all to the majority of stroke victims?

Alan Johnson: I am sometimes confused whether people want central command and control. The one consistent thing through all 10 SHA reports is the need to specialise in heart disease, stroke disease and serious traumas. Now, right across London and around the country, there is a real focus, and the stroke strategy that we published in December was probably the most widely welcomed Government health document that we have ever seen. Indeed, the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire praised the philosophy behind it. So it is no good pretending that people will get as good stroke care in hospitals where the clinicians experience these problems only once in a blue moon. They need specialist care, and that is how we are beginning to bring down the number of deaths from strokes and to ensure that we compare favourably with all the health services in Europe.

Brian Iddon: Between the poorest parts of my constituency and the better-off parts of Bolton, there is 15-year mortality gap. To address that problem, Bolton PCT has just launched a major programme to screen by March next year all 45-year-olds—44,000 altogether—who have not had basic health checks recently. Will my right hon. Friend send Bolton PCT his congratulations, along with mine? In 1997, its precursor would not have had the resources that it has today to carry out such programme.

Alan Johnson: I send my congratulations to Bolton PCT. Again, here there is a mix between what is done nationally—for example, the smoke-free legislation that we introduced a year ago, which was not an easy decision to make—and the action that takes place locally. In my hon. Friend's constituency and mine, we see terrific initiatives to tackle deeply entrenched problems of health inequalities. I congratulate Bolton PCT and all the other PCTs across the country that are getting to grips with this issue.

Patrick Cormack: What does the Secretary of State's statement offer in the way of hope for a more human and humane service to the cancer patient in my constituency who received the most appallingly cold and bureaucratic letter telling him that he cannot have the drug? When he wants to see a doctor in the middle of the night, someone comes and, with satellite navigation, eventually finds their way to the house but has no knowledge of the patient and little knowledge of the language. What does the statement offer that man?

Alan Johnson: The hon. Gentleman touches on some of the issues. Irrespective of what else happens in the NHS, his constituent will feel let down by it. There will always be treatments that do not go through the NICE process or are still undergoing the appraisal process. In those circumstances, it is up to the PCT to make a decision. What we say in the constitution is that a patient now has a right to a proper explanation of why a treatment has been denied. They also have the right to ensure that they are treated with dignity, respect and compassion. Those things can be measured. The press were talking about the size of a nurse's smile, but the Royal College of Nursing supports us on this because although safety and effectiveness can be measured, compassion and dignity are equally important to patients' experience. We can measure those factors through patient surveys and ensure that the quality of care improves for everybody.

Clive Efford: I welcome the statement and the fact that my right hon. Friend has reiterated that future Secretaries of State will remain responsible for the framework and accountable for the future of the NHS. The Opposition seem to want to do away with national targets, but can he explain how we could set a national framework without targets? Does he ever envisage a day when a Secretary of State will come to the Dispatch Box and say, "It's not my fault, mate: it's all the local people taking decisions."? What is being proposed is a free-for-all in the NHS, which is where we were in 1997, when we had an internal market that did not provide a consistent service across the country, and passports that would have taken money out of the NHS to subsidise the private sector. It is only this Government who are protecting the NHS and only a national framework that will do so.

Alan Johnson: My hon. Friend is right. Waiting times were the major concern in every survey. Patients were dying on waiting lists of more than two years. I have quoted the best that the Conservatives could do after 16 years in government—it was a disgrace. Getting hold of that situation and reducing waiting lists to an average of nine weeks—and a maximum of 18 weeks—for all the diagnostic tests and so on by the end of this year will be a major achievement. Of course we need to ensure that the NHS is clinically led and locally driven, but that does not release me as Secretary of State, or us as a Parliament, from our responsibility for ensuring that we have a national health service providing a uniform quality of care across the country.

Kenneth Clarke: Ever since the Labour Government were converted to the principles of reform, Ministers—including the present Secretary of State—have expressed support for patient choice and competition between providers. Can the Secretary of State reassure me that he is not moving away from that by now insisting on using the words "empowerment" and "transparency", and adding a load of management consultancy jargon and the legalism of a constitution written by whoever prepared his statement for him today? If he wishes to make a reality of local patient-based services, why not just give GP practices more control over commissioning and implement practice-based budgeting? If he wants polyclinics to emerge, which they could with some benefit in London and parts of big cities where there is an obvious need for them, why does he need a centrally managed national plan to impose them—and use resources—in areas where there is not the slightest evidence of local demand or need?

Alan Johnson: For two reasons. First, for 60 years we have had the bizarre and perverse result that there are half as many GPs per head of population in the poorest areas. That is Dr. Julian Tudor Hart's inverse care law, under which the people who need the care most are least likely to get it. We are not putting up with that any more. Putting new GP services in the 25 poorest communities in the country will tackle health inequalities, and it is essential that we do that— [Interruption.] Opposition Members say that that would have happened anyway, but it did not happen in 60 years. Incidentally, on the second point, neither has there been a GP service that patients can access from 8 am to 8 pm, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Yes, I plead guilty to saying that we should provide the funding from the centre to ensure that that happens. It has not happened since 1948, because of either a lack of funding or professional opposition. The "Anne of Green Gables" idea that if we just hand over the money to the British Medical Association it will ensure that that change happens is, frankly, ludicrous.
	My final point to the right hon. and learned Gentleman is that there is more than one word to use. We use the simple word "choice", as I hope that he will see, over and over again in the constitution. Practice-based commissioning needs to be developed further, and that is part of the review, but the real issue of choice comes down to the patients. We are introducing, for the first time, an element of the tariff that will be based on quality. That is an important development to drive quality through the system.

Mary Creagh: My right hon. Friend's national vascular screening programme will be of great interest to my constituent, Kath Howitt, whose husband Glen died two years ago, very suddenly, at the tragically young age of 39 with undiagnosed high blood pressure. Will my right hon. Friend ensure that the tendering process for the new GP services will not be over-burdensome and will allow innovative social enterprises, such as Local Care Direct, which offers out-of-hours GP services in Wakefield, to increase their scale and reach? Will he ensure that the tendering process allows a level playing field and does not hinder such initiatives?

Alan Johnson: I am sorry to hear about my hon. Friend's constituent. Of course, it is crucial to have this screening programme for everyone—men and women from the ages of 40 to 74, with a call and then a recall every three years. When we announced it, there was only one dissenting voice—the representative of the BMA, who said, "We don't have the capacity." Now we are providing that capacity, not just for that condition but for abdominal aortic aneurysms, which are one of the biggest killers of men over 65. I can assure my hon. Friend that the services will be properly tendered and will allow social enterprises, pharmacies and others to compete, although the majority of the screening programmes will take place in GP's surgeries.

Richard Taylor: May I welcome the emphasis on quality, and particularly on compassion and kindness? The debate in the House on 17 June on polyclinics cleared the air very well and told us exactly what GP-led health centres will have to provide. It also made it clear to me for the first time that existing GPs could bid for those services. It has come to my notice that the offers of bidding have closed in some PCTs before general practices have been aware of them. Is there any way by which the length of time can be extended so that GP practices can tender on a level playing field?

Alan Johnson: Ironically, it was the Opposition who gave us the opportunity to clarify the situation by going against the propaganda that they had been putting out. I am happy that the hon. Gentleman saw that clarification. Only one contract has been awarded, and that was awarded to a social enterprise. We expect the vast majority to go to GP consortiums and there is no way that those consortiums have anything other than a level playing field as regards bidding. If the hon. Gentleman has any details about where he believes that there has been a problem, and if he writes to me, I shall look into it and try to ensure that the proper procedures take place.

Lynne Jones: May I ask my right hon. Friend how greater choice and control over health care will be extended to groups that are sometimes very vulnerable, such as people with mental health conditions, and those for whom society has generally had less sympathy, such as people with gender dysphoria? On the subject of mental health wards, may I invite my right hon. Friend to join me and visit the brand new in-patient facilities that have recently opened in south Birmingham, of which we are very proud?

Alan Johnson: I will very gladly come and look at the new facility in south Birmingham. It is important to point out that we must ensure that mixed-sex accommodation is eliminated in mental, as well as physical, health facilities. On the issue of mental health, as I said earlier, there was a specific pathway—one of the "pathways of care", as they are termed in medical circles—on mental health. When my hon. Friend has had a chance to look at the report, she will see that the result, particularly in her area, is that there will be a complete focus on ensuring that if people are incapacitated to such a degree that they are not able fully to control their own destiny, they will have someone with them—an advocate—to make sure that the right decisions are made. As the World Health Organisation keeps saying, there is no physical health without mental health. In the report, mental health is as important as any other aspect of health.

Phil Willis: I was a little concerned about the fact that the right hon. Gentleman did not mention the ambulance service at all in his statement. A week ago, one of my constituents called for an ambulance at 7 o'clock; by 8 o'clock, when an ambulance eventually arrived—all the ambulances were in York and Scunthorpe and were not available—she was dead. What does the Secretary of State have to say to her family, and to others who do not get the care that they need simply because there is no ambulance available for them?

Alan Johnson: I very much hope and trust that that is an exception to the normal rule, and I will look into the circumstances of that case if the hon. Gentleman would like me to do so. Ambulance services and paramedics are a crucial part of the report. When he has had a chance to look at it—I appreciate that we are talking about 10 SHA visions in every region of the country, and by an enabling report by my noble Friend Lord Darzi—he will see that the issue is crucial to ensuring quality. Paramedics and ambulance staff are even more important now, particularly as regards stroke care, which we talked about earlier. Care for a stroke patient should start at the moment when the ambulance arrives, not when the patient gets to hospital.

Gordon Prentice: My friend told us that NHS staff will be able to leave the organisation and subsequently contract with it as members of a social enterprise. How many people does he think will take advantage of that offer in the next year or two, and what are the advantages of going down that road, both for the national health service and for groups of former employees?

Alan Johnson: I am not sure how many people will take up the offer. There are already three or four social enterprises across the country. When we went through the process, we found that lots of front-line clinicians, including midwives, nurses and physiotherapists, wanted to link together and set up their own organisation—and sometimes to move into adult social care as well—to avoid the bureaucracy sometimes involved in different NHS organisations working together. What stopped them was the fact that they wanted to preserve their pensions. For instance, people providing sexual health services in my patch, Hull, told me just a couple of weeks ago how much more they could do if they could set up their own organisation.
	Today, we are saying that PCTs that are being difficult on the issue will have to treat a request from staff seriously. If the change goes ahead, staff will retain their NHS pensions. In addition, for the first three years, the contract will not go out to tender; the people involved will be guaranteed a clear run. I believe that lots of providers across the country will be keen to take up the suggestion. The unions are very keen for us to go a step further and ensure pension portability everywhere. That is much more difficult. Ensuring that portability in social enterprises is easy; for the independent sector, it is very difficult.

James Arbuthnot: Forty per cent. of children who die of cancer die of a brain tumour, yet it takes longer to diagnose a brain tumour in this country than it does in many other countries in Europe, or in the United States. How will the review help to push brain tumours up the national health service's list of priorities ?

Alan Johnson: Once again, when the right hon. Gentleman has had a chance to look at the eight clinical pathways, one of which included the issues of paediatrics and children's care, he will see that there are some really important developments. Strategic health authorities and local clinicians are saying, "If we were empowered to do things differently, we could improve services and do what we need to do, not just nationally, but locally." There is a clear concentration on improving children's health as part of that clinical pathway.

Tom Levitt: The modern equivalent of outright opposition to the NHS in 1948 is the professional cynicism that we hear today from the Opposition and, indeed, from some parts of the medical profession. Does my right hon. Friend not agree that some doctors—some, only a few—talk as if healthier patients are a threat to their livelihood? Will he assure me that over the next few days and weeks he will spend his time not in defending the health service but in proselytising the advantages that it brings to patients, communities and the people who work in it?

Alan Johnson: I can proselytise for England, and will do so for the national health service, which is very precious. Yes, there are disputes, disagreements and so on with organisations and individuals but, basically, there is a huge buy-in to the next 60 years being even better than the past 60. I believe that we can work together with all organisations, whoever they represent, to make this vision work and improve patient care for everyone.

Damian Green: The Secretary of State talked about GPs providing "responsive, accessible, and high-quality services", so will he take this opportunity to remove the axe that he has placed over the level of service provided by rural GP practices in my constituency that run their own dispensaries, which he plans to close down if there is a pharmacy near by? One of them has written to me saying that that would involve making redundant two salaried doctors, cancelling all phlebotomy services and discontinuing ECGs, 24-hour blood pressure monitors and 24-hour heart monitors. If he is genuinely concerned about GP services, why is he continuing with this mad plan?

Alan Johnson: That is myth No. 380 from the Opposition. What we have announced in the pharmacy White Paper is a consultation to look at dispensing pharmacies, principally because we need to ensure that patients have a proper choice. All the things that the hon. Gentleman mentioned in  Hansard are absolute, complete, undiluted poppycock. We are not proposing any such thing.  [Interruption.] Poppycock is the mildest word I could find. People should not be frightened of a consultation that concentrates, not on vested interests—I know that Opposition Members are absolutely imprisoned by vested interests—but on the good of the patient.

NEW MEMBER TAKING THE OATH

The following Member took and subscribed the Oath:
	John Michael Howell Esq., for Henley.

Opposition Day
	 — 
	16th Allotted Day

Energy Security

Mr. Speaker: We now come to the main business, which consists of Opposition day debates. I inform the House that I have selected the amendments to both motions in the name of the Prime Minister.

Alan Duncan: I beg to move,
	That this House acknowledges that the security of the UK's energy supply has become of increasing importance over the last five years; understands that with over eight GW of coal and a further seven GW of nuclear generating capacity coming offline in the next decade the UK faces a potentially serious energy gap by 2016; regrets that with only 2 per cent. of the UK's energy needs coming from renewable sources, the UK is one of the worst performers in Europe; notes that the Government's own Renewables Advisory Board has established that the UK is set to miss its EU renewables target for 2020 even with significant policy changes; further notes that, as an island nation, the UK has major potential as a source of wave and tidal energy; deplores the fact that the Marine Renewables Deployment Fund has not delivered monies to a single project since its creation in 2005; regrets that the Government's latest Energy Bill contains insufficient provisions for feed-in tariffs for microgeneration, the fast roll-out of smart meters or any serious help for the fuel poor; and urgently presses the Government to act now to secure the UK's energy supplies for the future.
	At the heart of this debate is the need of the entire world to wean itself off its extreme dependency on oil. I say that as a former oil trader and as someone who has been steeped in the industry for more than 20 years. May I therefore declare my interest in the sector, and make reference to my declarations in the register, the annual printed version of which is due to be printed soon?
	We have called this debate to discuss an issue on which our economic survival depends. The security of our energy supplies, whether for lighting our homes, fuelling our cars or powering our industry should always be one of highest priorities. But now, as we look ahead to the next 10, 20 or 50 years, there are uncertainties and complications that never existed for previous generations, including rapid growth in the demand for energy, and the threat of a drastic climate change caused by burning fossil fuels. So, when we talk about energy security, we must acknowledge that there are three dimensions: supply security, climate security and price security. The need to resolve those three problems has become extremely urgent, and so far, a chronic lack of decision making has seriously compromised our ability to act and to adapt as needed.
	Our understanding of the issue has dramatically changed over the past 20 years. I remember working with an oil company that used to specialise in supplying heating oil in winter to the fuel poor. Its promotional gizmo comprised a small Perspex cube containing a small quantity of oil, and printed on the outside was its proud slogan, "Thank you for making the world a warmer place". I do not know what the company would happily print there today, because the whole world seems to be heating up.
	The debate takes place against a background of record prices and the inevitability of further increases. Gas prices are trading at 59p today and at 107p for the first quarter of 2009, which will have a massive impact on consumers. It is widely expected that gas prices will increase by as much as 40 per cent. by the winter and that electricity prices will do so by only marginally less. That could increase the numbers in fuel poverty by up to 1 million and cause huge pain to households throughout the country, so it is clear that price security and energy security go hand in hand.
	We recognise that the United Kingdom has been lucky over the past century. We were at the centre of a western-dominated system of global trade and finance that brought not only huge social and economic benefits, but underpinned our role as a formidable force on the international stage. Through a quirk of geology, we enjoyed the good fortune of having an enormous amount of natural resources at our disposal—first coal, and then oil. That has helped make us prosperous, but it may also have helped make us complacent.
	Now, the world economy is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Gradually, the centre of gravity is shifting eastwards, and China and India have developed faster than many people could ever have imagined, opening up new trading corridors and creating flows of capital that completely bypass the west. Each extra 1 per cent. of economic growth results in a 1.5 per cent. increase in the demand for energy, creating unprecedented global pressure on energy demand, so we are no longer assured of being at the head of the queue for the vital commodities that sustain our economic growth. Whereas 15 years ago we may have looked to the North sea for our energy requirements, the decline of production from the continental shelf has exposed us more and more to the variables of global markets.

John Redwood: Does my hon. Friend agree that on the question of how to generate more power from non-carbon sources, it is highly likely that, come the next general election, we will still have no more decisions than we have today, after 11 wasted years?

Alan Duncan: My right hon. Friend is absolutely right about the importance of taking early and urgent decisions about new investment. That is exactly the point that I and my colleagues want to address and, as I often say to the Secretary of State, we endeavour to do so in a spirit of cross-party agreement, because if we form the next Government, as we hope to, it is essential that investors know that there will be continuity for their investments.

Oliver Heald: But has it not been obvious for some time that great economies, such as India's and China's, have been expanding fast and, inevitably, would want their share of those precious resources? Should not the Government have understood that point and done something—taken action—to provide for our future energy needs?

Alan Duncan: My hon. Friend is absolutely right about appreciating that our electricity generating capacity and equipment would to need to be replaced, and quickly, but to be fair to the Opposition, and occasionally I am—

Malcolm Wicks: We are the Government.

Alan Duncan: I am sorry; I am getting ahead of myself—two years ahead. I am always ahead of my time.
	No one—not even the experts—could have predicted the ferocity of the increase in commodity prices over the past year. It was a genuine shock to our economy and to that of the entire world. We can, however, look into the future to some extent.

Crispin Blunt: My hon. Friend is being generous to the Government in an unwarranted fashion. All the decisions that are being taken now in 2007-08 should have been taken in 2002-03, when the Government produced an energy White Paper that ducked all those decisions. The commodity price increases of last year apart, everything that is happening now and that we are having to deal with now was predictable.

Alan Duncan: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We can track a good four years of dithering and delay, for which a generation risks paying a very high price.
	We can look into the crystal ball and see the big picture looming. For instance, the International Energy Agency says that between now and 2030, primary energy consumption is expected to increase by two thirds. As demand growth already outstrips supply growth, the meteoric rise in energy prices that we are witnessing is likely to be a lasting feature and not just a temporary glitch. Given that crude oil is trading at around $140 today, the UK literally cannot afford to play this global game of risk.
	But we do not have to play that game. This island—with its high winds and high seas, its skilled work force trained in the energy industry, its manufacturing sector restructuring towards a high-tech and value-added model and its green financial centre in the City of London which is leading the world in carbon trading—is uniquely placed to go green and secure our energy independence. Under our Conservative vision, not only is it possible to combine energy and climate security, but that is the only practical strategic choice. However, that long-term vision can be made possible only with the political will to make big decisions. As my right hon. and hon. Friends will argue, the Government's lack of action in the past decade has not only compromised our long-term low-carbon future, but left us vulnerable in the short term as well.

Steve Webb: I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman on the importance of the new emphasis on renewables and the United Kingdom's renewables capacity. Presumably, they were also important 10 years ago. Can the hon. Gentleman remind us about the share of renewables that the Labour Government inherited from his party?

Alan Duncan: That is a slightly ridiculous question; that was such a long time ago. Renewables hardly existed 10 years ago. So much has changed in the past decade and so much could have been done.
	Over the next 15 years all but one of our nuclear fleet of power stations will be withdrawn from service, a third of our coal plants will be decommissioned and we will need about 25 GW of new electricity generating capacity to keep pace with our expected needs and the predicted economic growth. As my hon. Friends have pointed out already, the Government have been aware of that impending supply gap for years. Let me remind the House of what they said in the energy review a mere two years ago. They said that if, as the modelling of the then Department of Trade and Industry suggested, the closure dates of nuclear and coal-fired power stations coincided in about 2015—and we all now know that they will—
	"market participants may not be able to respond by developing and commissioning new power stations in a timely fashion."
	That was in 2006. What has happened since? We have heard a great deal about nuclear power, although new reactors are still unlikely to be operating much before 2020. However, to give credit where credit is due—I am doing my best—I recognise that the Government have worked to identify the concerns of potential investors and to put in place a framework that answers some of those concerns; I pay tribute to the work of Dr. Tim Stone in achieving that.
	However, we are now waiting for talk to convert into action. In the meantime, we have added only one percentage point to our current renewable capacity, and that will not get near to meeting even the Government's original target of 10 per cent. by 2010, let alone the targets subsequently established by the European Union. We also have a Government who seem to be intent on building a new generation of coal-fired power stations at almost any cost, leaving future generations with a massive carbon headache.
	The problem for the Government is that they know that they have ducked the big decisions over the past 10 years. We have had White Papers, reviews, consultations and strategies, the latest of which—it was only a consultation—was published last Thursday, yet it still feels as though the momentum that the country needs for investment and change has hardly got beyond first base. Much of the blame attaches to the Prime Minister, who did little for the environment while Chancellor and who, now he is Prime Minister, simply does not understand energy markets. He asked Sir Nicholas Stern to write a report on climate change and then totally ignored most of its main proposals. He could have helped to establish the first UK pilot scheme for carbon capture and storage at Peterhead, but he ignored it and the project collapsed. He put £50 million into a fund to develop marine renewables, but made the conditions to access it so complex that so far not a single penny has been given away. His latest trick was to try to persuade OPEC to turn on the taps and invest its cash in our green technologies. That stunt, which turned into a humiliating begging mission abroad, showed scant understanding of what oil is or how the international commodities markets work. One cannot ask the Saudis to pump more oil when it is the wrong kind of oil and when global refining capacity is already strained, and one cannot expect the price of oil to go down when the pricing structure is far more dependent on militant attacks in Nigeria or the falling value of the dollar than on a few more barrels of Arab heavy.

Chris Bryant: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way, especially as I was not here at the beginning of his speech. He will know that, over the next few years, energy security across Europe is likely to become more dependent on the Russian Federation for supplies of oil and, in particular, gas. Is he as disturbed as I am by the most recent harassment of the BP joint venture by the Russian authorities, and does he believe that Europe should take a much more concentrated and united approach towards Russia on energy security?

Alan Duncan: I am reluctant to delve into areas that are better answered by someone who represents the Foreign Office or has the foreign policy brief. The relationship between BP and TKK is very complicated, and I would not like to say anything rash and silly across the Dispatch Box that might in any way jeopardise the profound discussions that are going on. In terms of security, we do not get much gas from Gazprom; a lot of it goes to mainland Europe, particularly Germany. However, the interdependence between European consumers and Russian suppliers needs to be understood, because without their markets abroad, Gazprom and the producers in Russia, the former Soviet Union, would be unable to subsidise gas supplies in their own domestic economy. It is a far more complicated picture than many newspaper commentators suggest, and we have to be very responsible in what we say.

John Horam: In getting the right balance between security and greenness, does my hon. Friend agree that the signal failure of the Government is not to give sufficient weight to technology, which can play a huge role, particularly in carbon capture, where the relevant technology is available and could be brought into effect with very little delay?

Alan Duncan: I will expand shortly on carbon capture and storage, which is a crucial ingredient of this debate, as is the word "technology" that my hon. Friend used. Almost all sectors of energy production are on the cusp of a scientific revolution, whether it be the fuel cell, carbon capture, cleaner coal or, indeed, nuclear. In America, instead of having the carbon regime that we think should underpin policy here, people are putting total faith in technological change and development by investing millions, if not billions, in the science. We have chosen a slightly different path towards the same end, and each is a legitimate route. In the end, technology, above all, will address the problem that we face.

Oliver Heald: Germany, which was mentioned in the context of gas from Russia, has made strenuous efforts to diversify its energy supply. I believe that it is installing something like 130,000 photovoltaic panels a year, while we are installing only about 200. That shows that other countries have taken decisions and got on with the job of providing alternative sources of energy, while our lot have been snoozing.

Alan Duncan: One of the key differences between us and Germany, which has, in our view, encouraged the development that my hon. Friend rightly identifies, is that it has feed-in tariffs and we do not. I will return to that matter in a moment.
	How can anyone believe that this Government can give the lead we need for a green energy revolution when, after 10 years in office, it is their policies that have left us 25th out of the 27 EU countries in terms of the proportion of energy we generate from renewables? The price any country might face for not taking such serious decisions is clear: economic chaos. We saw that in South Africa, where 10 years ago, the power company Eskom told the Government that unless investment was made, power cuts would follow. That warning was heeded too late. Electricity blackouts have now become a common occurrence there, and they may continue for another five years. The economic costs cannot even begin to be calculated; businesses, agriculture and tourism have all been severely affected.
	Such consequences in Britain would be utterly devastating, and to avoid them, we need to act now to ensure that the market delivers our energy in a way that is not skewed towards carbon-heavy fossil fuels. Our vision for energy security is built on three key planks: going green, cutting consumption and securing supplies. It is only by driving all those factors forward at the same time that we will be able to maintain clean, reliable and affordable energy. Overall, changing behaviour and championing energy efficiency will have far and away the most significant effect on the sustainability and, therefore, the security of our energy policy. The smart meter, for instance, could become one of the most important drivers of energy efficiency in the country. We are tempted to insert a new clause in the Energy Bill, requiring all homes to be fitted with a smart meter in 10 years. We are pleased that the Government have moved forward on that general principle, following the pressure applied from both sides during the Bill's passage through the House.
	We opposed the Government's proposal for electricity display devices on the basis that the information did not give consumers the full capacity to change their behaviour, or to sell electricity back into the grid via the use of domestic microgeneration. We are glad that the Government are no longer pushing ahead with that proposal, but valuable time has been lost while they arrived at the conclusion everyone else had already accepted.

Phil Willis: Would the hon. Gentleman agree that the country faces two massive barriers that the Government must deal with very quickly? One is the planning system, which is relevant to the roll-out of renewables, because it clearly militates against making the required decisions in the time needed. What do the hon. Gentleman and his party have to say about that? The second barrier is the availability of the national grid to those wanting to put electricity into it, and its fitness for purpose in the 21st century to deliver what the hon. Gentleman, our party and, I am sure, the Government want. What does he think about that?

Alan Duncan: The hon. Gentleman's attack on the national grid is unwarranted. It faces a massive challenge. The infrastructure has served us well over the years, and Britain has been very lucky to have a national grid. Massive challenges face the National Grid Company in investing money to cope with, for instance, a new nuclear power station with a far greater capacity than existing ones. Rather than attack National Grid, the hon. Gentleman ought to understand the challenges, and support its efforts.
	On the Planning Bill, we agree that there needs to be a swifter planning process, but we were unhappy with the Bill because of the undemocratic nature of the decisions to be taken. We did not approve of the independent planning commission, and I even think that some decisions should rest with the Secretary of State. We are concerned that there is no clear explanation of how the community infrastructure levy will work, and national policy statements that do not come to this House will lack any democratic warrant. That is why we expressed concerns about the Bill.

Brian Iddon: rose—

Alan Duncan: I shall take one more intervention and then press on, otherwise I am going to go on for ever.

Brian Iddon: I am grateful. There is 9.3 GW of renewable energy waiting to come on to the national grid. What is the hon. Gentleman's party's policy on the national grid, considering that that huge amount of energy is waiting, never mind the energy that is queuing up behind it?

Alan Duncan: The national grid needs to be able to take the energy that is ready to come on, rather than take it from power stations in the order in which planning was applied for. It is not easy, and I suspect that there will be a shift from onshore wind, which represents most of the energy that the hon. Gentleman identifies, to greater input from offshore wind. I shall come to that in a moment, because I wish to talk briefly about the renewables obligation.
	What would we do? First, we need to kick-start a renewables revolution in the UK. At the moment, that is proceeding at a snail's pace and a lot of targets have been missed. The UK has 40 per cent. of Europe's wind resources, but just one tenth of Germany's 20 GW of wind capacity. That is related to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) made a moment ago. The current renewables obligation has skewed investment heavily in favour of onshore wind and methane, so we support the Government's decision to band the obligation and clear the path for the necessary massive expansion of offshore wind.

Michael Weir: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Alan Duncan: Does the hon. Gentleman mind if I press on? I think that I am taking too much time, and the time for the debate has been compressed because of the statement.
	With offshore wind operating at a load factor of about 35 per cent., it is clear that the Secretary of State's plan for 33 GW of sea-based turbines by 2020 is, to say the least, ambitious. We need a major roll-out of microgeneration for domestic households, schools, hospitals and public buildings. Even a report by the then Department of Trade and Industry estimated that we could get up to 40 per cent. of our electricity from microgeneration in the next 45 years. Even that figure lacks ambition, because ground source heat pumps, wind turbines and photovoltaic solar panels are increasing in efficiency and decreasing in cost all the time.
	The best way to create a commercial market for microgeneration would be a system of feed-in tariffs. There should be no doubt about that. More than 16 countries in Europe have such tariffs, and there is about 16 times more microgeneration in those countries than here in the UK. The Government's refusal to implement them in their latest Energy Bill is baffling. Alongside microgeneration, we need a comprehensive strategy to be implemented for the capture and use of heat. In Holland, combined heat and power became the biggest generating force in the country during the 1980s, yet UK power stations are losing £5 billion-worth of heat every year. We need to harness it as a source of energy, not dissipate it as a source of global warming.
	Small-scale renewable projects do not go far enough. We still need a massive expansion of major renewable and low-carbon projects to suit the scale of the challenge that we face. Britain has an incredibly rich range of natural resources to build on. This emerald isle sits in a sea the power of which, if harnessed, could provide huge amounts of electricity to both the UK and Europe. It is clear, too, from a report by EEF, that marine technologies represent a gold mine for British companies looking to establish themselves in the low-carbon industry.

Michael Weir: Is the hon. Gentleman aware, however, that there is a provision in the Energy Bill on the banding of renewables obligation certificates, which would give those undertaking demonstration offshore wind and marine renewables projects the choice of either a double-banded ROC or repaying the large grant? There is great concern among those in demonstration renewables projects that they will not proceed. What is his party's position on that?

Alan Duncan: I understand the hon. Gentleman's concern and I know that exchanges between him and the Secretary of State about that have taken place in the past. I think that the Secretary of State undertook to write to him.
	However, the Government have not capitalised on our extraordinary advantages. For example, I would like an explanation of why their much vaunted marine renewables deployment fund has neither attracted significant interest nor distributed any funding in more than three years. It is all the more perplexing because Britain has more businesses engaged in developing marine energy devices than any other country. Why have the Government created eligibility criteria that are so complicated that companies simply cannot find the wherewithal to apply?
	Furthermore, as was said earlier, we all recognise that coal could play a fundamental role in our future energy security. However, where we could have expected leadership, there has been muddled thinking. The Government's delays have resulted in our one developed carbon capture programme closing down. What has happened to it? BP is working to develop it in Abu Dhabi, so a great British scientific breakthrough has been lost to this country.
	The Government's lack of vision has resulted in only one carbon capture and storage pilot project, whereas we know that there will be demand for more new coal-fired plants over the next few years. Are they to go ahead without CCS? The right and sensible way forward would be for the Government to accept our proposals for three CCS projects and move towards maximum limits on emissions so that the industry has absolute clarity about how it needs to change.
	There is also the question of storage. Our onshore gas storage is currently among the lowest in Europe. Some European countries are required to retain 80 days' worth of gas, but we have the lowest storage, yet we are at the end of the pipe. Our position contrasts starkly with that in the winter of 2005-06, when we came within days of running out of gas.
	For legitimate reasons historically, which are associated largely with North sea production, we have not developed the sort of onshore storage infrastructure that is normal elsewhere. That must change. I accept the contribution that new pipelines and liquefied natural gas can make, but as our domestic gas supplies dwindle, we need to be sure that we have sufficient supplies for several weeks, not just days.
	We tabled a new clause to the Energy Bill that would require the Secretary of State to make an annual statement on his assessment of our long-term storage needs and the steps that the Government were taking to deliver them. The Government's refusal to accept the new clause again makes us fear that they will not take the necessary steps to ensure our long-term energy security.
	The debate must be seen against the EU targets for renewables, which the Government negotiated. The Secretary of State knows that few people believe that they are achievable except at massive cost to businesses and households in this country. It is not a time for the Government to say that we should aim high—of course we must, but the aims must be achievable and realistic. Time after time, the Government have set targets and slid away from them as it becomes apparent that they are undeliverable. That happened with renewables and with fuel poverty targets, but the EU targets are on a different scale. The Government must explain in much greater detail the way in which we can achieve a target of generating 15 per cent. of our energy and perhaps 40 per cent. of our electricity from renewables.
	What do the Government perceive as the role of marine and tidal energy? How would we achieve those targets if the Severn barrage either were deemed too damaging to the environment or was held up for years by wrangling? They need to explain how they have decided how much it will all cost. The Government's estimate is £5 billion to £6 billion a year, but the Renewables Advisory Board estimates that the cost could be as high as £100 billion in capital investment from UK industry and property owners. Indeed, it was reported this month that Paul Goldby of E.ON believes that the Government's green energy targets could add £400 to the average household's fuel bills as utilities companies pass on the additional investment costs to consumers.
	Of course, we want tough targets for renewables and low-carbon energy, but we also want them to be realistic and achievable so that investments are made on sound business principles to establish as much energy independence as we can, not to satisfy the EU's arbitrary whims.
	Energy security is one of the most important issues on the political agenda and its significance is growing. The various elements that make up this country's approach to energy should not be taken in isolation. It is no exaggeration to say that, together, properly structured and implemented, they will determine our very survival. To avoid a period of profound peril 10 years hence, the decisions to avoid that peril must be taken now. Too few such decisions have been taken. For the sake of our future, we urge the Secretary of State to get on with it without delay.

John Hutton: I beg to move, To leave out from "House" to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:
	"acknowledges that the Government is addressing the recent sharp increases in fossil fuel prices, which reflect an imbalance between supply and demand in global markets, through international engagement; recognises that the UK has the most competitive energy markets among the G7 nations, as recognised by independent analysts; acknowledges the Government's success in establishing a market framework which encourages sharp increases in gas import and storage capacity; further acknowledges the Government's success in establishing a clear framework for investment in new nuclear generation capacity through the Nuclear White Paper, and in setting out a blueprint for a historic expansion of renewable generation through the Renewable Energy Strategy consultation; recognises the Government's work in promoting energy efficiency as an integral part of its strategy; commends the Government's efforts to counter fuel poverty through the Winter Fuel Payment and through securing major financial commitments from energy supply companies; notes the Government's support for microgeneration; recognises that the Energy, Climate Change and Planning Bills will provide a legislative framework that is fit for purpose in changing market conditions and that supports the Government's policy objectives; believes that the Opposition's failure to show clear leadership on energy could put at risk Great Britain's energy security; condemns their failure to support the Government's Renewables Obligation; and deplores their opposition to the Planning Bill, which will provide greater certainty for major infrastructure building and help secure Great Britain's future energy independence.".
	I welcome much in what the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Alan Duncan) said, particularly his analysis of what is happening in energy markets and his appreciation of the scale of the challenge that we face in responding to it. I agree with a lot of what he said about the importance of tackling the threat of climate change, too. He is right that in some respects there is a measure of cross-party consensus in the House about the right way of dealing with those challenges. However, he will not be surprised to hear that I disagree strongly with his analysis of the actions that Her Majesty's Government have taken so far to address those considerable challenges.
	May I offer the hon. Gentleman a little bit of friendly advice? I am not sure whether he chose the topic for today's debate or whether he was frog-marched, as it were, into tabling such a motion—we can speculate about that—but I thought that the point of Opposition Supply days was for the Opposition to showcase their policies. However, I obviously had that wrong, because I listened intently to what he said and he clearly has no policies to showcase. We heard nothing from him or in any of his hon. Friends' interventions that shed any light on what his approach would be. In a week when his party—and, I am afraid to say, the Liberal Democrats—voted against the Planning Bill, which is probably the most important reform of recent times and which can help us to secure our country's energy future, the hon. Gentleman has some cheek in moving his motion today.

Alan Duncan: The Secretary of State says that we have not put forward any policies. Which of our policies did he miss? Was it feed-in tariffs, smart meters, agreeing with the changes to the renewables obligation certificate or carbon capture and storage? I could continue with the list, but it would appear that he was not listening.

John Hutton: No, I was listening to the hon. Gentleman's comments, and I want to talk about what I understand his party's policies to be in a minute. Indeed, I wish that they were as straightforward as he is now presenting them to be. I want to highlight some of the confusions that characterise his party's policy on energy.
	The Government have taken the necessary decisions to help secure our country's energy future, not ducked them, on climate change, nuclear power and shaking up our planning system, as I said, so that we can get on and make the important changes that need to be made. The Government have made the right decisions. On renewables, we have set out what I believe to be the best way of securing our long-term energy needs, lessening our dependency on fossil fuels in the process. On every one of those issues, the Opposition have been found wanting—pandering, dithering, gesturing.

John Redwood: If a company wanted to embark on getting planning permission to build a nuclear power station today, would the Secretary of State advise it to wait until the quango is set up and the national policy statements are in place and to use the new system, or would it be quicker to go under the old system?

John Hutton: We are likely to see planning applications being made in the next couple of years, and they will be dealt with under the new system. The new system will be more streamlined and effective. I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman has talked to potential nuclear investors, but strong support is being expressed, and not just by the CBI and some other industry organisations, for the reforms that Her Majesty's Government have proposed. Let me say to him and others that the status quo is not a credible option. The current planning regime has woefully let down the country's needs in relation to major energy infrastructure projects. If we need confirmation of that point, we need only cast our minds back to the six-year long Sizewell B inquiry, which I believe significantly delayed investment in nuclear power.

Doug Henderson: Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Liberal Democrats, who oppose nuclear power, and the Conservatives, who are not prepared to vote for the planning means to get nuclear power, not only put at risk our future energy security but create an obstacle for the British engineering companies that make a huge contribution to world technology and jobs in this country? It is envisaged that up to 200 nuclear power stations will be built over the next 30 years worldwide.

John Hutton: I strongly agree with my hon. Friend, and I pay tribute to his lifetime support for the nuclear industry. There was an unfortunate unholy alliance between the Liberal Democrats, who opposed the planning reforms and who oppose nuclear, and the Conservatives, who say that they support nuclear but opposed the planning reforms. One is a means of achieving the other, and I believe that the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton needs to go back to the drawing board and reconsider his position on this issue and many others.

Martin Horwood: If undemocratic planning procedures are so essential to promoting renewables, why have 22 out of 25 European Union countries managed to promote renewables with a lot more community involvement and democratic consultation in planning than the Government are proposing?

John Hutton: If we look at the planning arrangements in many other European countries, we see a much more streamlined system. It is not part of the Government's reforms, which the hon. Gentleman is deliberately mis-describing for his own reasons, to take away the opportunity for people to lodge a proper objection to a development. It would be quite wrong to do that, and I challenge him to say that that is the right way to describe the reforms that we have proposed.
	There can be little doubt that securing the UK's energy supplies as we make the transition to a low-carbon economy is one of the greatest challenges that our country faces. As the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton has rightly said, we are doing this against a backdrop of rapidly rising energy prices. In the face of this new global landscape, our efforts are focused on three principal issues. First, we must ensure the greatest degree of energy security and independence for the United Kingdom. Secondly, we must address the threat of climate change. Thirdly, we must do all that we can to mitigate the impact on consumers of the rising cost of energy.
	I shall deal first with the issue of energy security. As we all know, global competition for energy resources is intensifying. Resource nationalism, closed-off markets, subsidies and state-owned monopolies are all combining to remove investment incentives to exploit the world's energy resources. Another pressing reality that we need to face is the ageing nature of many of our existing power plants. Over the next two decades, we will need to replace one third of our energy generating capacity. Nine of our current power stations will be substantially affected by the implementation of the large combustion plant directive, and might have to close by 2015. All but one of our nuclear power plants will have closed by 2023. This domestic reality demands that we all take decisive action.
	First, we need to maximise domestic energy production. The UK still meets about two thirds of its energy needs from the UK continental shelf. There could be at least 25 billion barrels of oil and gas equivalent left in the North sea, and we need to do all that we can to utilise those remaining resources. In 2007, the highest number of offshore exploration and appraisal wells was drilled since 1996. About 300 million to 400 million new barrels equivalent was discovered, and this year has seen the highest levels of interest in new licences for more than 30 years.
	However, we cannot afford to be complacent. We are committed to maximising UK oil and gas production, and that is why I recently announced measures to incentivise increased production in our existing oilfields and to enable new fields to come on stream as soon as possible.

John Redwood: Why did the Government spend the previous years increasing taxes and tweaking the tax system against the producers of North sea oil and gas in a way which they warned would result in their not optimising production? Are not the Government only now belatedly realising what a mistake that was? Why do they posture with the Saudis when we could do more to raise production at home if we had the right tax system?

John Hutton: My right hon. Friend the Chancellor is responsible for petroleum revenue tax. He regularly meets the oil and gas industry to discuss these issues, and it has strongly welcomed our recent proposals and announcements. As to the right hon. Gentleman's comments about the Saudis, it is quite wrong to characterise the discussions with them as pandering; that does not do him any justice at all.
	As I said, we need to create the right investment climate for UK energy infrastructure, which is rightly our No. 1 priority. Billions of pounds have been invested in new gas storage, which the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton mentioned, and new import infrastructure. He rightly referred to the new LNG terminal at Milford Haven, which will bring Qatari liquefied natural gas into the UK. Also under construction is 8 GW of new generating plant.
	We are also forging ahead to develop the low-carbon technologies that we need to support our security of supply and climate change objectives. Last year, we set out measures in the energy White Paper to triple renewable energy capacity through the renewables obligation. In September, we began a feasibility study on a barrage across the Severn estuary—one that could provide as much as 5 per cent. of the UK's total electricity requirements. In December, I announced plans that could allow companies to build 25 GW of new offshore wind capacity by 2020. Last week, we announced with Ofgem immediate action to strengthen grid access for renewables—a matter to which my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon) referred. Our proposals on connect and manage should help unblock some of the current delays in getting new renewable projects connected to the grid much more quickly. Perhaps as much as an extra gigawatt could now come on stream much more rapidly.
	Last year, there was a 20 per cent. increase in offshore wind generation capacity, and we will soon overtake Denmark to become the world's leading offshore wind generator. The hon. Member for Rutland and Melton was highly critical of the Government's record on the promotion of wind power. It is worth reflecting on one fact: as a country, it took us 20 years to generate the first gigawatt of wind-generated electricity; the second gigawatt, under the present Government, took 20 months to bring on stream. We must do more, and do it urgently, to meet our share of the EU 2020 renewables target.

Michael Weir: I hear what the right hon. Gentleman is saying about offshore wind, which is clearly an important way forward. However, the deep offshore wind and marine renewables sector has expressed concern about changes in energy legislation and I have corresponded with the Minister for Energy on this matter. Although there are grants under the present system, I understand that they are repaid by future profit, but under the new scheme a choice will have to be made between the double-banded renewables obligation certificates or these grants, and I am told that that will result in the sector being unable to get investment for many of these projects. Will the Secretary of State look at that again, because deep offshore wind and marine renewables are an important part of the renewables future, and unless we get this right, it could have a serious impact on our ability to meet the targets?

John Hutton: It is true that companies cannot choose between grants or renewable obligation certificates. That has been the long-standing position, but perhaps the hon. Gentleman would like to intervene later on my hon. Friend the Minister for Energy. I am sure that that debate will be a fascinating one for us all to read in  Hansard at our leisure.
	Last week, as the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton pointed out, the Government published our own route map for achieving our ambition on renewable energy. A tenfold increase in renewable energy within the next 12 years is, I accept, a hugely ambitious target. We also aim for a sevenfold increase in the amount of renewable electricity generated in the UK and we are proposing measures that will extend and raise the value of the renewables obligation—the principal mechanism of incentivising such investment. We are proposing to introduce a new financial incentive to deliver a tenfold increase in renewable heat sources as well. Again, the hon. Gentleman referred to many of the technologies, including ground-source heat pumps, that could make a difference in that respect. We will consider increasing financial support, including feed-in tariffs, to stimulate microgeneration of heat and electricity in our homes.
	I have to say that the policies of the Conservative party, as I understand them, represent in all those regards not a step forward, but a step backwards. The one thing that investors tell us time and again is to keep the incentive regime predictable and not to scrap the renewables obligation for large-scale electricity generation. So what do the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton and his party actually propose to do? They still propose to scrap the renewables obligation— [Interruption.] If the hon. Gentleman would like to correct that position, he is welcome to intervene.

Charles Hendry: The Secretary of State should go back to the consideration in Committee of the Energy Bill, where we made it quite clear that we support the banding of ROCs for larger-scale projects. On feed-in tariffs, the measures that we proposed would give the Secretary of State discretion. He could therefore decide at what level feed-in tariffs would be appropriate for microgeneration and at what level ROCs would be appropriate. We would give him as much flexibility as possible because we recognise that the two systems can work side by side, but we want to give him the discretion to decide at what level they come in.

John Hutton: I suppose that that is a clarification.  [Interruption.] It is a clarification of sorts. I confess that I have simply referred to the Conservative party policy documents. Obviously, the hon. Gentleman has announced today that they have all changed. I very much— [Interruption.] Am I wrong to say that they have changed or am I right? I am not sure what the hon. Gentleman is talking about. I suggest that he read his own party's policy documents. He will find them quite explicit—later in the debate, we can confer about that—and they confirm the Conservatives' current policy.

Phil Willis: May we perhaps concentrate on Government policy, and may I ask the Secretary of State a simple question? There have been estimates that up to £100 billion will be needed to fulfil the obligations courageously set out last week. Will that will be loaded through the taxpayer or entirely through energy bills?

John Hutton: This is an Opposition Supply day, so it is quite reasonable for me to question the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton about his party's policy.
	Returning to the point raised by the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis), the £100 billion figure is the sum total of private sector investment needed to finance this change in our electricity consumption. Yes, it will be paid for, ultimately, by consumers. That is true, and we have set out in the document our baseline assumption about the impact on bills and what it will mean.
	We will need to do more on energy efficiency and providing further help and support for fuel-poor households—we accept that challenge—but as I am sure the hon. Gentleman understands, as a distinguished Select Committee Chairman, there is no way of somehow conjuring up that money out of nowhere, with no consumer ever being affected by it and all of us getting on with the rest of our lives without noticing that £100 billion. We will notice the £100 billion in our bills over the next 10 years. There is simply no other reality for us to address. The challenge for the Government is to mitigate the impact of those rising bills. Again, in our renewable energy strategy, we set out some ways in which, sensibly, we could do that, but we must all keep in mind that simple reality.
	I want to come back to the point made by the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton about feed-in tariffs, because he is right that they have had a significant effect in many other countries in bringing on new technologies, but at significant cost to consumers. Germany, for example, is often cited, as it was today by the hon. Gentleman. He, like the House, will be aware that there are moves to reduce the feed-in tariff because of the impact on consumer bills.
	At a time of rising energy prices, it is incumbent on us to take into account how we make the transition to a greener power generation system. We must take into account the impact on people's bills, because our constituents will come to us and say, "Why are my energy bills going up to meet the costs of going green?" We must have convincing arguments for that.

Robert Flello: Indeed, that impact will be not only on everyday folk through their energy use, but on companies in the ceramics industry in my constituency, which are high users of gas, for example. There will be an impact on the ability to produce products that can be sold at a price that people can afford.

John Hutton: We have to be aware of the impact not just on consumers, but on industry. I want to come to that in the context of my remarks on the emissions trading scheme.

Paul Flynn: On the question of costs, how has my right hon. Friend become bewitched by the pied piper of nuclear power? It has been heavily subsidised, never delivered on cost or on time, and left us a £73 billion legacy. The new nuclear facility in Finland is already two years late and £1 billion over budget. Are not all the other alternatives—wind, wave and the other renewables—far more attractive and practical? They will certainly come in at better value than nuclear.

John Hutton: I do not think we should say no to any low-carbon form of power generation. Nuclear power is a proven and reliable way of generating low-carbon electricity, and I think it would be wrong for a generation that has taken advantage of the benefits of reliable nuclear power, as this generation has, to say to future generations "We are sorry, but we are not going to give you the option of nuclear power in the energy mix."
	My hon. Friend has a difference of opinion with the Government on nuclear power, and I am sorry about that. I do not think that he takes into account the new economics of energy in the world, the high—probably sustainedly high—prices of fossil fuels, and the necessity of action on climate change and the impact of a carbon pricing mechanism such as the emissions trading scheme. All those changes have opened up a space in which new nuclear facilities can operate, which is why so many countries around the world are actively pursuing the nuclear option, wisely and sensibly in my view. At the end of the day, however, it is for the private sector, not the taxpayer, to finance investment in a new nuclear power station, and my hon. Friend's concern about subsidy is therefore misplaced.

David Hamilton: Some of us are sitting on the fence in relation to nuclear power, and like others I am still to be convinced, although I am not closing my mind to it. As consumption in China and India is expected to rise by 50 per cent. between now and 2030 and as coal will have to be burnt, surely a country that has extracted only 15 per cent. of its coal reserves should be talking about major investment in the coal industry as well as the nuclear industry.

John Hutton: I strongly agree with my hon. Friend. I think that we must keep the option of clean coal on the table as well, and that it would be wrong to introduce new measures, as proposed by the Conservatives, which would make it impossible for new coal-fired power stations to be commissioned at any time soon in the United Kingdom.

Richard Ottaway: The nuclear industry is complaining of a shortage of skills in the sector. Its main complaint is that it has nothing to plan against when it comes to recruiting and training people. What certainty can the Secretary of State give the industry, and how will he provide the skills that are needed?

John Hutton: I agree with the hon. Gentleman; the issue of skills is a potential key bottleneck in the United Kingdom's nuclear renaissance, and we must address it systematically. How can we do that? We can do it in a number of ways. Obviously a deal flow on new nuclear power generation will create the certainty to which the hon. Gentleman refers, and I hope we will begin to see that. In the meantime, however, there are things that we can do, and are trying to do, to address the problem that he has highlighted. The National Skills Academy for Nuclear, for instance, has recently started to function, and it is taking on and planning to train 1,000 extra apprentices in the industry.
	What we cannot afford to do is wait three or four years before doing anything to address the skills problem. If we do that, our ambition will be constrained and we will probably have to rely on migrant experts to come and help us with our nuclear programme. I see this very much as an opportunity for the nuclear industry in the United Kingdom to undergo a significant revival.
	I heard a Liberal Democrat say in response to a comment from my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, North (Mr. Henderson) that there were no suitable British companies. If that is really the Liberal Democrats' view, I think that they should get out of the House a little more and travel around to see some of our outstanding manufacturing companies, which have tremendous potential to create tens of thousands of highly skilled jobs in this sector, many in parts of Britain that desperately need them.

David Davies: While we may disagree on other matters, does the Secretary of State not share my concern that, paradoxically, those who are most worried about global warming appear to have shut their minds to the only reliable form of electricity generation that does not generate any form of carbon dioxide? Does he not find that puzzling? Will he ensure that we get on with building nuclear power stations as quickly as possible? Rather than building only enough to generate 24 per cent. of our electricity, should we not go beyond that, as the French have?

John Hutton: I hope the hon. Gentleman feels better for that. I agree with him about the scale of our ambition. At present about 19 per cent. of our electricity comes from nuclear sources, and I have made it clear that we should not set a cap on the contribution of nuclear power in the future. That is for the market to decide, not Ministers. My personal sense is that our ambition should be significantly higher, for the good and sensible reason the hon. Gentleman has given: that such power is low-carbon and reliable, and the technology is proven and safe.
	We would be cutting off our nose to spite ourselves if we were to take an ideological view about nuclear. In the 12 months that I have been in this post, I have learned that the ideologues on energy policy are those who jeopardise our energy security the most. What we need is a hard-headed, practical, common-sense view about how we can have a broad-based energy policy in the UK that utilises all the technology available to us, including nuclear. We are going to need all those energy sources in order to be sure about our energy supplies in the future.
	There is a long section of my speech dealing with nuclear, but I might already have dealt with the subject.

Jamie Reed: Before my right hon. Friend departs from the issue of nuclear, on skills retention and development in the UK, will he confirm that the national nuclear laboratory will be of fundamental importance in making us a world leader yet again? Also, as to the decommissioning costs of the civil nuclear programme, can he confirm that the £73 billion or £78 billion that is often talked about—sometimes rather glibly—is principally a military waste inventory?

John Hutton: My hon. Friend probably knows more about the nuclear industry than any other Member, having worked in it for many years and now representing Copeland, which adjoins my constituency. He is right about the legacy issue, and he is right generally about the role of nuclear going forward. I pay tribute to his work.
	I hope that we are all agreed—perhaps with the exception of my hon. Friend the Member for Newport, West (Paul Flynn) and others who share his view—that the job in terms of nuclear is to clear away the barriers to investment in new nuclear, strengthen the regulatory framework, create a clear, fair and predictable planning process, incentivise the UK supply chain, where there are tens of thousands of jobs in the making, and continue to build public confidence in a long-term solution to waste management.

Anne Main: Will the Secretary of State give way?

John Hutton: Will the hon. Lady allow me to speak for a little longer?
	We are beginning to develop an important consensus with the Opposition party on the importance of new nuclear as part of the UK's energy mix. I very much welcome that, and I also welcome the distance travelled by the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton, although even now a nuclear investor could be forgiven for not being entirely clear about his party's view on some of these matters. Not that far into the past, I and many others heard the Leader of the Opposition say that his
	"policy, green energy first, nuclear as a last resort, is absolutely right."
	The hon. Member for Rutland and Melton very shortly afterwards popped up and said, in an attempt to correct his leader, that it was not a last resort, but just "two words" in a document that "we binned months ago". The Conservative party's green supremo, Mr. Zac Goldsmith, upon whose shoulders the Tory detoxification process largely resides, then described nuclear power as a total waste of money and stated that
	"if the party said nuclear power was good, I'd fight like hell against that."
	No wonder, then, that recently Baroness Warsi—a member of the shadow Cabinet, no less—in response to a question from Andrew Neil about whether the Tory nuclear policy was unfathomable, replied simply, "Um, it is."
	The planning reform Bill debated in the House last week is seen by every potential nuclear investor as critical, and we cannot afford a rerun of the six-year Sizewell B inquiry. Those who opposed the Bill—

Anne Main: rose—

John Hutton: I have not yet quite finished this point. I will give way to the hon. Lady shortly.  [Interruption.] This is the only part of my speech that I am actually enjoying, so I hope that she will let me finish it.
	Those who oppose the Planning Bill put our country's energy security and our climate change objectives at direct risk. Investors need predictability. We are in a fiercely competitive global market for new nuclear and I want to ensure that investors see the UK as the best new-build market in the world. Our planning reforms will help us to achieve that.

Anne Main: I thank the Secretary of State for giving way. Will he briefly address the comments of Hamish Roberts, managing director of the Aon natural resources team for strategic risk management? He said that the Government's plans for nuclear expansion are unachievable unless they think beyond the risks of safety. Will the Secretary of State address the terrorism risks in future plans for fuel security?

John Hutton: I have not seen that comment, and I do not believe that the ambition we have set out for nuclear is unachievable. Of course we must address the issue of nuclear safety, but nuclear power in the UK is a safe and secure form of technology. There is very substantial security designed specifically to deal with terrorism, as I am sure the hon. Lady will know if she has ever visited a UK nuclear power plant. So I do not think that terrorism is the issue here. Security certainly is, but our nuclear industry is a secure industry. Nuclear is not a last resort, as some have said, but a vital resource for our country and I hope that there is emerging common ground between us on that.
	As we bring on these low-carbon technologies, we are not naive enough to dismiss the importance of fossil fuels for UK energy security. Generators will want to continue to have the flexibility that fossil fuels provide to cope with peaking demands, and they can have that flexibility while meeting our international climate change obligations. As we all know, emissions are capped by the EU emissions trading scheme—not an emissions cap on individual technologies, because that is not necessary, but a cap for power and energy-intensive sectors as a whole.
	That is why I believe that the Opposition's new policy on the future of coal is another potential threat to UK energy security. In practice, it would place an effective moratorium on new cleaner coal facilities in the UK. It would place a double dose of regulation on energy investors for no beneficial effect. It would lock in older, higher- emitting coal generators and would not make a jot of difference to whether we were more or less likely to meet our climate change targets. Instead, it would necessarily make us more reliant on gas imports—at a time when gas supplies around the world, as we all know, are increasingly politicised.
	Policies that might get three cheers from some lobby groups usually turn out not to be worth the paper they are written on. If one prods this latest one from the Opposition for 30 seconds or so, it becomes clear that it is ridiculous—short-term, populist, headline-seeking and naive. In fact, it looks at first like a Lib Dem policy, not a policy from a party that aspires to be in government. It is not just my views on these matters that, I am sure, the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton would take seriously; it is the views of Richard Lambert, from the CBI, who has condemned this policy in very trenchant terms, and David Porter, from the Association of Electricity Producers. Effectively, the Opposition policy is to make carbon capture and storage mandatory before it has been demonstrated successfully as a technology. That is the wrong approach.

David Taylor: Does the Secretary of State agree with me that thousands of millions of tonnes of coal remain to be worked in the United Kingdom, perhaps via technologies that we do not yet fully understand? The next key stage in the process is a viable carbon capture and storage system, and we know that work is going on in that regard. If, by some mischance, the Conservatives returned to power in 2015 or beyond, they would have access to CCS. However, does the Secretary of State agree that it is unlikely that they would pursue that route, not least because the shadow Secretary of State has a constituency, in north-east Leicestershire, with almost 1,000 million tonnes of coal that remains to be worked? That looks a very juicy prospect to me, and it is about time that he moved into it.

John Hutton: The option of using clean coal is one that we should keep, which is why we have taken the decisions that we have in relation to carbon capture readiness and CCS. The option of new clean coal technology would be effectively ruled out by the policies that we have heard recently from the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton.
	I have described this Opposition policy as naive, which is not a word I would usually use, but on this occasion it is totally justifiable. However, I do not accept at all that the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton is naive. He has had a very substantial career in the oil industry. He and many of his colleagues cannot really believe in the approach that has just been put forward by the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron). It must be the panderers who have come out on top again. The panderers used to be an endangered species, as we all remember, but sadly they now seem to be alive and well— [ Interruption. ] That was the joke, actually; it is not coming—it has been delivered. There are a lot of panderers in the Leader of the Opposition's office, and a lot of wildlife organisations will welcome that, but I personally do not.

Brian Iddon: I made the point in Committee that post-combustion capture of carbon is the most inefficient method, but that is the direction that the Government are taking. As a chemist, I know that pre-combustion capture allows us to generate chemicals, especially hydrogen. Why have we chosen post-combustion capture?

John Hutton: We made that decision on advice, because it is the most globally relevant technology if one considers what is happening in India and China, where a gigawatt of new coal-fired capacity is being added every week. There is no doubt, given the reality of that sort of use of fossil fuel, that we need a technology capable of being applied to that type of power generation, and that is why we have chosen post-combustion carbon capture and storage. Other countries are exploring other technologies—for example, Norway is looking at a gas scheme, and the US is considering a project along the lines that my hon. Friend mentions.

Robert Flello: Does my right hon. Friend understand the great sadness felt by my constituents and others in north Staffordshire? They sit on vast reserves of coal, but the mines were closed in the 1980s by the party that now talks about what should have been done in the past in terms of investing for the future— [Interruption.] My constituents are frustrated that those resources are there, but it appears that nothing will be done with them in the future.

John Hutton: I do understand that. It is especially unbecoming for Conservative Members to barrack my hon. Friend when he makes a fair and valid point. They obviously do not like to be reminded of their record in government.
	It is worthy of note that significant investment is now going into coal extraction, and that should be welcomed because it is a source of energy security for the UK. However, we must ensure that we use it in as clean a way as possible, and that is what we are trying to do.
	My final point is about the action that we are taking on energy prices. Unprecedented global demand for fossil fuel has resulted, as we all know, in wholesale gas and electricity prices more than doubling since 2007. Producers and consumers have a mutual interest in avoiding high oil prices in the short term and a shared interest in decarbonising our economy over the long term. That is why, at the recent energy summit in Jeddah, we proposed that consuming nations open up their energy markets to new investment from oil producers—a sensible suggestion—so that oil-producing countries have a stake in the future of tomorrow's energy technologies. In return, we need oil-producing nations to open the door to increased investment in expertise to exploit the full potential of the world's oil supply in the short term.
	Clearly, high oil prices impact disproportionately on the poor, so we must continue to make the eradication of fuel poverty a priority for action. Since 1996, more than 4 million households have been lifted out of fuel poverty. Since 2000, £20 billion has been spent on fuel poverty benefits and programmes. When it comes to fuel poverty, therefore, we will take no lessons from the party that, as we all remember, imposed VAT on gas and electricity bills. One of the first things that we did when we came to office in 1997 was cut VAT on fuel bills, helping millions of consumers in the process. I do not dispute that we can and should look to do more, and we will make further proposals in due course.

Peter Bone: I have listened carefully to the Secretary of State's long speech, but he has not mentioned the failure of the European Union to liberalise its energy market. Is he going to say a few words about that?

John Hutton: We have made progress in that regard. The hon. Gentleman will be aware of the recent outcome of the Energy Council, which my hon. Friend the Minister for Energy attended and where he did a very good job for the UK. We have made progress, but we have not got everything we wanted. We also have a two-year review, so we can take another look in two years. It is not true to say that nothing has been done.
	As I said, we are focused on ensuring that the UK has the most resilient energy system that it can through a diverse low-carbon energy mix. That demands nothing less than a revolution in our energy systems both at home and abroad. We must move away from the old carbon-intensive economy of the first industrial revolution and embrace the new low-carbon technologies of the next industrial revolution. This is the right time to accelerate our progress towards that end, securing not just our long-term national interests but a new generation of green-collar jobs in the British economy. That is why I am pleased to announce today that the companies shortlisted from the pre-qualification stage of our carbon capture and storage demonstration competition have been announced. I am also publishing proposals today that will help us to develop the right regulatory framework to make carbon storage a reality and to explore what carbon capture-ready means for new power stations. Copies of both documents are available in the Library.
	The criticisms of the Government that we have heard today are misplaced. They are nothing less than opposition for opposition's sake. The Opposition's policies would not help to steer our country through the difficult times ahead but would instead make matters worse. As I said earlier, the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton has not set out a coherent alternative because he has none to offer. I urge all my right hon. and hon. Friends to reject the Opposition motion tonight and to support the amendment in the name of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister.

Martin Horwood: We welcome the opportunity for this debate. It is timely given the state of the international energy markets, the state of our constituents' fuel bills and, of course, the publication last week of the Government's renewable energy strategy consultation. We will support the motion because it contains much that is right, but it also has some weaknesses that I shall consider in my remarks.
	The motion is right at least to mention fuel poverty, although I think the subject could have been highlighted rather more. It is absolutely essential that we ensure there is a fundamental shift in the way that energy companies' tariffs work in this country, if necessary through changing the remit of Ofgem, so that we can guarantee the lowest tariffs for the poorest customers, so that price spikes deliver benefits to poor customers as well as the energy companies, and so that we can ensure that energy efficiency measures are prioritised for the least well-off customers first. I am sure that the Conservatives' response to fuel poverty and the specific policies, rather than the rhetoric, will emerge during the course of the debate, but I might have missed them during the speech made by the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Alan Duncan).
	The motion is also right to highlight the problem of the potential energy gap. We are indulging in an important national debate about how we deliver a sufficient, affordable, reliable and sustainable energy supply for this country. I am surprised that, although it is about the threat to energy security, the motion is rather silent on the potentially greater threat of climate change. That might be because there is an emerging split among those on the Conservative Benches about some of the issues relating to climate change. That was evident in Committee on the Climate Change Bill last week, when the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) and others led a rebellion against their Front-Bench team on whether the Bill should include a reduction of 80 per cent. in carbon emissions by 2050. The Conservative rebels supported Liberal Democrats and Labour Back Benchers, while the Conservative Front Benchers sat on their hands on that vital issue. I can therefore understand why Conservative Front Benchers might not be highlighting the climate change dimension to this debate.

David Davies: It always puzzles me how people from the hon. Gentleman's party can talk about an 80 per cent. cut in carbon dioxide emissions when they are not willing to support the measures, such as nuclear power, that alone can deliver that.

Martin Horwood: I shall come to explain how we would do that in the course of my remarks. The hon. Gentleman should just be patient.
	The motion is also right to highlight the UK's renewable energy potential, which was estimated by the Renewable Energy Association at some 14 to 18 times the current level of electricity sales in the UK. The hon. Member for Rutland and Melton said that 1997, when Labour took over from his Government, was such a long time ago that renewables hardly existed then. Nevertheless, for a full six years the Liberal Democrat policy had been to increase the renewables proportion of energy generated to 20 per cent. I think our original target was to do that by 2005. The fact that we spotted the potential so much earlier than other parties is regrettable. It is nice to say, "I told you so," but our job would be much easier now if anyone had listened to the Liberal Democrats and the green movement in those days. The Secretary of State was rather dismissive of Liberal Democrat policies, but the Government do come around to them, albeit 20 years later.
	The motion rightly mentions the potential of wind and tidal energy, and highlights the issue of the marine renewables deployment fund. It is quite wrong that such a high proportion of the money—£42 million of the £50 million in the fund—will go to technologies that are already commercial. We are thereby missing the opportunity to develop and support pre-commercial technologies. In contrast, the Scottish Ministers' wave and tidal energy support scheme specifically includes pre-commercial technologies, and so it has supported important developments such as the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney, which already funds nine projects. That is in stark contrast to the performance of the MRDF, which, as the motion points out, has yet to fund a single project.
	Supporting pre-commercial technologies would enable us to make progress on issues such as the Severn barrage. I support the exploration of the technology that the Government are undertaking, but things are made more difficult by the fact that there are no demonstration projects up and running, or even planned, for alternative scenarios that might have a lesser environmental impact, such as the creation of tidal lagoons. An MRDF that considered pre-commercial technologies might be able to fund a lagoon demonstration project, and therefore make an important contribution to exploiting the enormously important Severn estuary, and other renewable resources, with minimal environmental damage.

Robert Key: I entirely agree that we should consider tidal flow energy and lagoons—options that the Government are avoiding. They are sleepwalking towards the construction of a Severn barrage, an absurdity that will be bitterly opposed. There is very little evidence that it will be cost-effective. The Government should stop behaving as though there will be no opposition to the Severn barrage. The Minister for Energy made a big mistake in rubbishing what the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said on the subject recently. I hope that the Government will learn better ways in future. The barrage would have a devastating, irreversible impact on the whole Severn estuary.

Martin Horwood: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and he is right to highlight the real environmental concerns of the RSPB and bodies such as the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust. However, it is a little premature to say that there is no economic case for a barrage until we have seen the progress made in the Government's review. I would support the Government continuing with the process that they are undertaking on the Severn estuary and considering all the possible options. I simply seek to make that a more productive exercise by suggesting that they look at how the MRDF is used.
	Oddly, the motion omits to mention a range of renewable technologies, including solar, photovoltaic, solar thermal, geothermal and biomass. I would have thought that friends and colleagues of the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton from the National Farmers Union would lobby him hard to make that a priority. Nor is there mention of hydroelectric, micro-hydro—a potential new addition to hydroelectric power in this country—or even the much maligned biofuels. I believe that biofuels have potential. That is not a very trendy thing to say, because many people are highlighting the real risks that they pose to the rain forests, land use and food prices, and highlight the fact that in north America biofuels are being produced that have, if anything, a negative impact on global warming. I welcome the Government's commitment to strict sustainability criteria in the document published last week. It is therefore strange that they are ploughing ahead with the renewable transport fuel obligation without putting those strict sustainability criteria in place.
	The motion also omits clean coal technology, which has been mentioned by various hon. Members. That is regrettable, especially as the Conservatives have shared our criticism of the Government's carbon capture and storage regime, which has been too lax on new coal-fired power stations such as that at Kingsnorth, refuses to accept any kind of locking-in of carbon capture technology, and is too unambitious in its limited post-combustion competition for a demonstration project on carbon capture and storage.
	I was slightly surprised to hear the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton say that he supports an emissions performance standard for new power stations, although that is in line with comments made by the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron). During proceedings on the Energy Bill, the hon. Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry), who is now sitting on the Conservative Front Bench, opposed our amendment to introduce precisely such a system, saying:
	"Although I am sympathetic to and understand what Governor Schwarzenegger has achieved in California, my concern about the new clause is that it would introduce too many uncertainties into people's investment decisions" ——[Official Report, Energy Public Bill Committee, 26 February 2008; c. 221.]
	The Conservatives do not seem to have all their ducks in a row when it comes to clean technology.
	Most notably of all, the motion is silent on energy efficiency, with the sole exception of a passing reference to smart meters. Energy efficiency is, of course, the most cost-effective path to energy security that we can take, and it is vital that energy efficiency is a major part of our energy strategy. We should all be aware of the risk of the lights going out. It is worrying that in the coming decades we simultaneously face perhaps up to 20 GW of generating capacity coming to an end and a rising dependence on imported oil. We have been a net importer of oil since 2006, and a net importer of gas since 2004. The context worldwide is that there is 252 years'-worth of coal left, but perhaps only 72 years'-worth of gas and 45 years-worth of oil. There is also a dramatic increase in demand, as a result of the relentless growth of new economies such as that of China.
	I confess to having been sceptical of the alarming scenarios painted by some green movement members who have talked about peak oil, but I am a complete convert; peak oil seems to have been reached, and we face very serious economic as well as environmental consequences. A worrying scenario is set out in the Stern report, which mentions some historically successful ways of reducing carbon emissions. The most successful reduction of all was achieved by Russia after 1989, but it came about essentially through economic collapse. I hope that that is not the scenario the Government are aiming for—a scenario in which we walk blindfolded towards the edge of a cliff. I suppose that that would be the Northern Rock approach to ensuring housing affordability.
	It is sobering that although we face an oil price of $140 a barrel—Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley say it is not inconceivable that it will shortly be as high as $200—consumption is still rising. Disruption to supply was recently experienced in Nigeria, and is still possible in many other parts of the world. Speculation appears to be adding to the problem; people are betting on the prices getting higher in future. There also seems to be a greater lack of reserves and of flexibility in world markets now, and the combination of all those factors is potentially economically devastating. Similar factors are influencing European gas markets, especially as state-owned oil and gas monopolies are very influential, in terms of the link between gas and oil prices.
	The more reliant we are on imported fossil fuels, the more risky the picture looks, especially when we consider where the energy comes from. The oil comes from notoriously unstable regimes such as Iraq and Nigeria. We have a huge reliance on Saudi Arabia; although it is, in some senses, stable at the moment, it is nevertheless a monarchical dictatorship that relies on repression to maintain its political situation. In the long term, therefore, it cannot be regarded as a very stable source. Supplies of oil go through some very narrow choke-points, such as the Suez canal and the strait of Hormuz, and we have some very vulnerable installations. I was alarmed to read in the  New Scientist only recently that the Ras Tanura oil terminal in the Persian gulf handles fully one tenth of the entire world's oil supply. Those are very vulnerable and risky pieces of critical infrastructure. I come from Gloucestershire, where we are very much aware of the need not to put all of one's energy supply eggs in one basket: last summer, we nearly lost our electricity supply altogether as a result of relying too heavily on one single power supply station.
	The solution has been staring us in the face for generations. It is not, as some Conservative councillors in the south downs have suggested, to start drilling for more oil on the south downs. It is not nuclear; there is no example anywhere in the world of a nuclear power station being built without public subsidy, and it would leave a poisonous legacy to future generations. The previous generation of nuclear power stations still cost us some £1.5 billion per annum in clean-up costs, and an eventual long-term storage repository has not been found, even for first-generation nuclear waste. The location of such a repository is unknown, its price cannot be calculated, and it would be a cause of concern for thousands of years. Clean coal technology is part of the solution, but only as a transitional technology. The long-term answer is renewable energy in all its various forms.

Jamie Reed: The hon. Gentleman mentioned radioactive waste and the issues associated with its storage and ultimate disposal. How does he propose that the nation should manage funds, find a location, and finally get rid of responsibility for the storage carbon?

Martin Horwood: The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point, and there are parallels between the long-term storage of carbon and of radioactive waste, which is why it is a priority to develop carbon capture. We should think carefully about storage, and the use of CO2 to feed anaerobic digestion or create biomass might be a more a sustainable and, in the long term, safer way of using some of the carbon that is captured. We must all work together to find solutions to the problem that the nuclear industry left from the last generation of nuclear power stations. I am simply urging that we do not repeat that mistake.
	We have talked about various sources of renewable energy, so I shall not repeat what was said, except to say that we have enormous potential. The more diverse and decentralised our energy supply, the more resilient and safe it will be. We are supported in that view by the Government's own advisers. The Government sometimes listen to some advisers and not others, but a 2006 Sustainable Development Commission report on the role of nuclear power in a low-carbon economy—I am sure the Minister knows this quote very well—said:
	"Having examined a broad range of studies that offer different scenarios of our energy future, it is clear that there is more than enough renewable resource in the UK to provide a diverse, low carbon electricity supply. All the scenario results suggest that it is possible to meet our energy needs in a carbon constrained economy without nuclear power."
	It is a disgrace that we should languish close to the bottom of the renewable energy league table. It is a disgrace that the Government are still resisting feed-in tariffs, and are promising yet more consultation, thereby delaying their vital implementation, possibly for years. It is pretty much a disgrace that the Government are proud to have overtaken Denmark in offshore wind, as that country has a population of little more than 5 million and far less coastline than the UK. It is a disgrace that, having retreated from their commitment or aspiration to generate 20 per cent. of our energy needs from renewable sources by 2020, even the lower 15 per cent. target is in some doubt. The Minister for Energy has occasionally referred to "15 per cent. or thereabouts" in recent statements, so perhaps we will receive clarification at some stage today.
	To end on a positive note, the Government have placed a more substantial focus on renewable energy than we have yet seen. The consultation offers us the opportunity to push the Government further on renewable energy: all that we can hope is that it is not too little, too late.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. We do not have very long, so it would be helpful if hon. Members took account of that. Back Benchers have been squeezed by the time taken so far, but I would be grateful for brevity.

Eric Illsley: I take on board your strictures, Mr. Deputy Speaker. This is a timely debate on energy issues, but there are only about 45 minutes left. When it began, we had only two and a half hours for debate, but the Front-Bench spokesmen took an hour and a quarter. As you suggested, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I shall keep my comments brief.
	We have had an interesting debate, and we have had a good tour d'horizon of a number of issues. I do not want to pursue that too much, because I want to make some points about the energy situation, and point out—this has not been referred to very much—the effect on industry of high energy prices, which are absolutely crippling. Energy prices for consumers have increased dramatically. On TV the other day, someone from the gas industry said that domestic consumers could expect price increases of 40 per cent. in the not-too-distant future. Those increases in gas prices and the squeeze on gas affect electricity prices as well, because we made the mistake a good few years ago, in 1988, of generating a lot of our electricity from gas.
	I was interested to hear the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Alan Duncan) begin his history lesson on the British energy situation in 1997. He should have started in 1988, when we privatised it and liberalised the markets, because that is when many of the problems started. We went into a privatised energy market, and we did away with the coal industry shortly afterwards in 1990. We tried to privatise the nuclear power industry in 1990, but we failed. When the City looked at the books—the former Select Committee on Energy, on which I served, saw those documents and reports by Rothschild, Kleinwort Benson and the other major finance houses—it saw how much the industry cost, and it ran a mile, so the Government could not privatise the nuclear industry. Many of the decisions that we are debating and the issues that we face go back much further than the past 10 years or so.
	At the same time as energy prices, including electricity, have increased, commodity prices have increased around the world. The price of everything is beginning to increase, and much of that is down to the increased cost of energy and the increase in demand. The amendment discusses the
	"imbalance between supply and demand".
	Presumably that refers to developing countries such as China and India, which have been mentioned, and whose economies are growing at a remarkable rate. Those countries, particularly China, are drawing in many raw materials and commodities, and demand many energy resources, too. Many of China's—and, to some extent, India's—energy resources are based on coal. Those countries are perverting the world supply and demand for gas and oil, because they are building their economy—as we have heard, by a gigawatt every week or so—on coal.
	There was a good article in  The Guardian last week devoted to carbon capture. It stated that last year, China built about 100 large coal-fired stations, and India built 30. Supply and demand for those countries is therefore based on coal. I am told by the UK's major energy-intensive companies that supply and demand for energy in Europe are pretty much in equilibrium, so the industry there is not suffering the same high energy prices that industry in this country is suffering. That makes our industry dramatically uncompetitive. The reason why Europe does not have the problems that we face goes back to the fact that we have a liberalised energy industry.

Peter Bone: I hope that I am not going to anticipate the point that the hon. Gentleman is about to make. The liberalised energy market is a European Union initiative and directive. It is our colleagues in Europe who are not playing fair, not the Government: it is not our side—it is the French and the Germans.

Eric Illsley: I do not disagree. The question is why we have been left with a liberalised energy market. We have been banging on about Europe liberalising its energy market to level the playing field and so on, but it is simply not happening. Our European partners are not playing ball, but if they look across the channel at what happened to us, they can see the problems that we face. They might therefore think that if they do that to their energy industry, they will go down the same route and be in the same predicament, so their reluctance is understandable.
	I remember in 2006 being in the Czech Republic when that country took over the presidency of the European Union. The presidency statement made a commitment to energy liberalisation, mainly because gas prices had gone up that winter, but two years later, nothing seems to be happening. The hon. Member for Reigate (Mr. Blunt), who is not in his place, made the point that we had an energy White Paper as far back as 2003. Since then, we have had another White Paper and a review of nuclear power and, last week, we had the £100 billion renewables review, but we are not doing anything. We are not making the decisions, and nothing is happening; we are simply talking about the same energy gap that we talked about in 2003. We are nowhere nearer bridging it, so we must address the question of why the energy problem affects our industries but not those in the rest of Europe.
	In my constituency, there is a glass-producing company that is part of a Europe-wide chain. Compared with the chain's plants in western Europe, the plant in my constituency is the most unprofitable, because of the energy crisis that it faces. The other day I saw some figures for the projected energy costs of another energy-intensive user. Its costs in 2002 were about £3 million per annum, by 2006 they had increased to £8 million, and its projected figure for next year is £21 million. It cannot continue in business with such energy costs. Unless the situation changes, we are staring down the barrel of major job losses and factory closures, because we are simply uncompetitive.

David Hamilton: May I make the point to which I think my hon. Friend is alluding? We need to stabilise the market in the United Kingdom and try to drive it forward while we wait for renewables to come along. We must talk not only about long-term investment in the nuclear industry, but about engineering and mining companies achieving the necessary long-term stability to invest long term in the coal industry while we wait for renewables.

Eric Illsley: My hon. Friend is right. As I said, we have been talking about the issue since 2003, and we must have stability. However, high energy prices are our short-term problem, and we have no way of addressing it—or it would appear that we do not at the moment. I shall come to the issue of the energy gap, but we also have the long-term problem of how we produce our energy from here on in.
	On the issues of oil and gas prices, energy generation and the rest of it, the Government ought to consider whether our supplies are too heavily traded and speculated on because of this country's market liberalisation. Other countries are not affected by such activity, but I read somewhere the other day that every barrel of oil in this country is traded 12 separate times before it is consumed. Obviously, somebody is going to try to make a profit out of each trade, and that is probably why our prices have been shunted further and further upwards.
	I remember speaking two years ago to representatives of a company in my constituency, who told me that one of their concerns about high energy prices was that the biggest gas customer in this country was Barclays bank. The banks were buying all the gas and speculating on it, because of the issues about future supplies. Members have already referred to the countries that supply our gas and to the fact that they are not exactly the most stable countries on which to rely for long-term supplies. The Government have to take urgent steps in the forthcoming months. They must look at what is happening to our industries and at the problems that we will face unless we get our energy prices down.
	On the issue of the energy gap, I am opposed to nuclear power and have been for a long time, but we have waited so long and our energy supplies have dwindled so much. Coal-fired stations are closing because of the large combustion plant directive, and the nuclear stations are coming to the end of their useful lives, so we have to do something, and if that something is a nuclear plant, let us get on with it. By the same token, nobody has been stopped from building a nuclear power plant in this country; the market simply has not wanted to do so, because of the disguised costs of nuclear power and the cost of nuclear waste, which we cannot ignore. If we were to examine the cost of the coal industry, we would have to take into account the disposal of all its waste.
	On what has happened over the past 11 years since 1997, I remember that back in the 1980s, the then Central Electricity Generating Board falsified the figures that were used to compare renewable and nuclear sources in order to make nuclear look more favourable. The wave energy machine of that time—electricity would be created from wave power—was heavily referred to as Salter's Duck. The origin of many renewables issues and of the current situation go back a very long time.
	We have talked about renewables, coal and nuclear power. The hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) made a good speech about nuclear energy, and I endorse everything that he said in what was quite an interesting contribution. We should have renewable sources of energy, but even if we carpet this country with windmills, we cannot hope that they will meet our energy requirements for the next 30 years. They clearly will not. We need some heavy-duty generating capacity to replace what we are going to lose, and the answer lies with coal. This country and the rest of the world are going to burn coal for a long time, and the coal industry is buoyant: about 600 million tonnes will be needed simply to fuel the power stations that have been built in the past two years. That is a lot of coal, and we have to face the fact that we are going to be reliant on it.
	Kingsnorth power station has been opposed because it does not have a carbon capture and storage facility, and it has been suggested that every planning application for a coal-fired power station will be held back unless it includes carbon capture and storage. That is a major problem. If we stop coal-fired generation on that basis, there will still be concerns about nuclear generation, and in the end, we will not have achieved very much.
	The answer is of course carbon capture and storage. It is not a proven technology, but the Secretary of State referred to what I understand to be a competition. He was challenged by my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon) about pre and post-combustion carbon capture, but pre-combustion carbon capture already exists, and it is operating in my constituency in the form of a coke oven. By converting coal to coke, much of the carbon and many of the gases are extracted from the fuel before it is burned, and they are easier to get rid of at that point in the process.
	I am too young to remember town gas and the burning of coke to create gas, but my hon. Friend the Member for Midlothian (Mr. Hamilton) will well remember it. The technology removed many pollutants from coal before it was burned and, as that technology is currently under consideration, it should not be too difficult to enhance it. Funnily enough, all the clean coal technology plants in this country, including the coal gasification plant at Point of Ayr and the fluidised bed at Grimethorpe, were closed in 1990 by the previous Conservative Government, who decided not to conduct clean coal technology research. We have to look at all aspects of generation, including renewables and nuclear, but we must get carbon capture and storage under way. We must realise that burning coal will be a major issue, and that we will have to rely on coal for a very long time.
	Finally, one line in the Government's amendment makes me raise my eyebrows. It says that this House
	"believes that the Opposition's failure to show clear leadership on energy could put at risk Great Britain's energy security."
	Why we are calling on the Opposition to show leadership on energy matters is completely beyond me, and I would worry about voting for that later. Perhaps the Minister will explain that line to us, and then tell us why it is the Government who need to show a little more leadership—and show it now. Let us make the decisions on new generating capacity.

Oliver Heald: As ever, the hon. Member for Barnsley, Central (Mr. Illsley) has brought some Yorkshire common sense to the debate. He made important points about the history of this issue and about our resources as a country. He also touched on energy efficiency, a point ably covered by the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) as well.
	How can a country such as ours—an island that is lapped by the waves, that can have tidal power and that has offshore wind, substantial reserves of coal and oil, and a population who would be happy to try microgeneration—be in the position of worrying about energy security of all things? We have more energy potential than most. It must be a reflection on the Government that they have not done better to ensure that we have the resources that we need for the future. Furthermore, it is an absolute gift to couple microgeneration with energy efficiency. In that way, we can say to people, "Look, do what you can to save energy. You as a citizen can influence things. At the same time, we will help you to produce energy if you can." That should be right at the heart of the Government's approach: they should be trying to get people to volunteer and help in this important cause.
	Yet what is the history of the past 11 years? Seven years ago, a royal commission looked at the issue and pointed to the coming energy gap. About five years ago, the Geological Society of London produced a major report to which 150 people contributed. It pointed out that in 10 years' time, we would be able to produce only 80 per cent. of the electricity that we need.
	Yes, the Government have had White Papers, consultations and so on, but what have they actually done? Other countries have been considering the issues. Germany, for example, is doing so much on solar power. Last year, 130,000 photovoltaic panels were installed in Germany, but only 270 were in Britain. Other countries have thought about what their natural solutions should be. Like France, Finland has decided to go with nuclear, and Iceland is doing work with geothermals. Those countries seem to have grasped the nettle. In our country, however, there has been a failure of action. That has been because the Government have not been prepared to take tough decisions; it is another example of dithering. It is not good enough that this country, with the potential that it has, should have been led to the poor situation that we are in today.
	Some of the incompetence is appalling. The marine renewables development fund had £50 million but not a single project was backed, as the hon. Member for Cheltenham said. BP was actually developing a carbon capture and storage plant at Peterhead, but did the Government back it? No. Why on earth not? We do not have a trained work force in respect of nuclear power, and we do not have enough transmission infrastructure, so people who have wind farms in Scotland cannot get on the national grid. The Government have been slow on solar power, have had no workers for nuclear power, have been clunking on carbon capture and are off target when it comes to offshore power generation. We are ending up with the situation described by the hon. Member for Barnsley, Central: we are covering some of our beautiful countryside with onshore wind farms, when the Government could have made decisions that meant that that was not necessary and we could have had a policy that really worked. The Government's policy has been careless and lazy.
	The Beane valley is a chalk river valley in my constituency. It has no pylons and its countryside has been the same for 1,000 years.  [Interruption.] The Minister should listen, because I am talking about the effect of his silly policy. Three wind turbines, each the size of the London Eye, have been proposed for that landscape, which comprises small rolling hills, copses and a tracery of fine lanes in the heart of Hertfordshire. The Minister says that that is a good policy for this country. It is not.
	The Government have been lazy for 11 years. We do not have what Germany, France and the other major European countries have. The Minister has sold us short, and the price that we are paying is the planning applications in the most heavily populated county of Hertfordshire that would ruin some of the precious landscape to which people throughout the county look for enjoyment and recreation. It is being spoiled because the Minister and his Prime Minister, including when he was Chancellor, were so lazy that they could not do a proper job.

Jamie Reed: Does the hon. Gentleman share my concern about microgeneration, which is perhaps something of a middle-class conceit? Does he have any idea, for instance, about how much it would cost an average family in the north of England to install a wind turbine on their home?

Oliver Heald: It surprises me that the Labour party has forgotten everything that Tony Blair taught it. There was the "toffs" campaign in Crewe and Nantwich, and now we are told that allowing the citizen to do something to tackle the problem of energy need is not relevant in the north of England. Let us forget the class war—the fact is that we have an energy security problem and everybody should be able to take part in solving it. If people want to do that through microgeneration or some of the other energy-saving schemes, they should be able to. We should not say, "Oh, that is middle class—let's not do it."

Jamie Reed: I regret that the hon. Gentleman has sought to misrepresent my views, but I admire the fact that he is facing both ways at once on the issue of renewables. The issue is about not class, but affordability. Class has nothing to do with it. I am simply pointing out that in some of the poorer parts of the country, microgeneration is simply not doable or achievable, and the idea that it should be a principal element of policy is, frankly, for the birds.

Oliver Heald: I was making the point that we can all save energy. We can all influence what happens in our country. If some people want to try microgeneration, that will be an additional help. The Government should be pressing on both fronts: they should be encouraging people to generate and to save energy. Their performance has not been strong.
	My first speech at a Conservative party conference, in 1989, was about energy efficiency labelling for white goods—something that the Conservative Government introduced in 1991. Many here will remember Margaret Thatcher's great speech about our having a leasehold, not a freehold, on the world. She explained the importance of energy efficiency in the modern world. That was all those years ago, and what have the Government really done on energy efficiency in the past few years? I have signed up to the Energy Saving Trust's plan to make each household more energy-efficient. The Government have not given much of a push to that plan; it has not been a central crusade for them.
	Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker; I have made the points that I wanted to make.

Brian Binley: You will be delighted to know, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that I had planned to make the most moving and effective speech on clean coal ever delivered in this Parliament's history, but tragically, in trying to accede to your request and be brief, I have cut it to the point where I cannot do so.
	We have heard right hon. and hon. Members outline the Government's failure in recent years, especially in terms of renewable energy, microgeneration and the roll-out of smart meters. We have talked about this country's abysmal lack of gas storage—we have 14 days' capacity, Germany has 99 and France has 122. That lack is part of a policy framework that suggests that the Government have abysmally failed the whole population.
	I want to concentrate on carbon capture and storage, on which the Government have acted with great timidity, caused disinvestment and, above all, created great uncertainty in the industry. That is a matter of great sadness. Large investment is required for CCS projects, which cannot proceed against a background of uncertainty, but people are having to invest in such a climate. Government policy is unclear: it appears that they support a single demonstration model of perhaps 300 MW and hope that eventually the emissions trading scheme will deliver a carbon price that allows investment to flow thereafter. That policy of wishful thinking has no certainty to underline it. Several large carbon capture projects were under development, but they have been frozen out thanks to the Government's indecision.
	The opportunity is obvious with between 240 and 250 years of coal beneath our feet and the ability to extend our oil production by up to 25 years. Together, those energy sources could solve our energy security problem, but the Government are not tackling that problem with any courage. As a result of a competition they decided in favour of a post-combustion working model—not a commercial station—to be in place by 2014. That decision shows that they do not see the need for any urgency whatsoever, yet that urgency is staring us in the face. That decision has undermined confidence in pre-combustion, where, conversely, technology is in place and we could create a commercial station by 2014. I need only mention the Centrica progressive energy project at Eston Grange to offer a good example of the impact of the Government's decision: a proposed 850 MW integrated gasification combined cycle coal-fired power station was being worked on, but, although it remains in being, its capability is likely to be scaled down drastically. That presents a massive problem—and so it goes on.
	We have undermined investment in clean coal to the country's great detriment. What a missed opportunity! On 17 June, Professor Stuart Hazeldine of Edinburgh university said:
	"Carbon storage could not only help the world, it could aid Great Britain plc. Develop expertise and hardware and we could sell them to China, India and other developing nations, and so make money while saving the world."
	That was a slightly romantic notion, but none the less it underlines a great truth in this debate.

David Hamilton: Could the hon. Gentleman row back a little in saying that he is disappointed with this Government? Thirty years ago, CO2 emissions capture was being developed by the National Coal Board, and 25 years ago it was happening at a time when the Conservatives were closing all the pits in the United Kingdom. Both Governments have left a lot to be desired on such developments.

Brian Binley: I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman's comments. I was not opposing such developments at that time—I was playing football and chasing birds, but that is another matter altogether. We are dealing with the here and now, and the situation is that the Government do not have enough confidence in clean coal technology, have not put enough investment into it, and have not planned enough for a proper policy. They are simply waiting until 2014, when we might see the outcome of a possible post-combustion project that will not have any commercial impact until 2020, 2022 or thereafter.
	I am not sure why the Government are being so timid. We have an Energy Minister who is normally robust and speaks his mind, yet I fear that his hand has been forced and he is displaying a level of timidity that he secretly would not want to show. I hope that he can tell us the reason for that timidity. Is it because he felt that the battle to secure the nuclear option would be greater that it has turned out to be, and that he could not have developed CCS adequately against that background? Is it because the oil companies have told him that it would be expensive and take too long, as Mr. Guerrant, the European director of ExxonMobil Gas and Power Marketing told the Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Committee two weeks ago? Is that why the Government have baulked at the challenge? Or is it because they, as the Government, did not have the confidence to grasp the nettle? By their timidity, the Government have held back the whole CCS process, and Britain's future energy security has been placed in jeopardy. We all must recognise that that is a great pity, to say the least.

Peter Bone: It is a great honour to follow my Northamptonshire colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, South (Mr. Binley), who made a splendid speech that went to the heart of the matter. I sometimes feel that the Energy Minister must go away at night and bang his head against his bedroom wall at the Government's indecision. If Prime Minister Blair were still here serving the full term that he promised at the last general election, I think that we would have had a lot more decisiveness.

Malcolm Wicks: We are all Blairites now.

Peter Bone: Indeed.
	I should declare an interest as listed in the Register of Members' Interests and say that I drive a biofuel car. I want to make two brief points. The first concerns biofuel, which has not been much discussed during this interesting and constructive debate. For Members who are not aware of it, I should explain that a biofuel car can run both on petrol and on E85, which is a mixture of 15 per cent. petrol and biofuel and is sometimes called flex-fuel. There are only 19 biofuel stations in the country, one of which is at Morrisons in Wellingborough.
	It seems strange that the Government are not encouraging more people to use biofuel to power their cars. I remember the former Deputy Prime Minister saying that he intended to reduce the number of miles that were travelled by car, but unfortunately the Government have failed in that regard. In 1997, motor vehicle traffic stood at 450.3 billion vehicle kilometres, whereas in 2006 the figure was 506.4 billion vehicle kilometres—an increase of 12.5 per cent. If we could reduce the amount of carbon that cars emit, it would be far better for the country. We know that biofuel does that, but there is a problem with a biofuel car, as I can testify—it can run quite happily on petrol, when it does the same mileage per gallon as a normal car, but when it runs on biofuel, its efficiency is significantly reduced, so one has to use a third more to get the same number of miles.

Ian Gibson: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that the Government's chief scientific adviser, Professor Beddington, has said that the global rush to grow biofuels was compounding the problem of climate change and that cutting down rain forest to produce biofuel crops was "profoundly stupid"?

Peter Bone: I realise that I have got very little time, so I will try to deal with that point straight away. One of the arguments against biofuels has been about the Brazilian rain forest, to the effect that when I drive down the motorway, instead of saving the planet, I am destroying it. However, the facts do not bear that out. Only 1 per cent. of the rain forest is being used for biofuel products, and the oil that it is generated is also being used in other industries. That argument is a bit of a red herring.

Martin Horwood: Surely the point about biofuels is that without proper sustainability criteria, the hon. Gentleman simply cannot tell what is in his tank.

Peter Bone: That is entirely right, and if I had the time I would have argued for sustainability. The situation is rather like that of the mobile phone. The first mobile phones were great clunky things that we carried around, and now they are very small. If we do not get the first run of biofuel efficiency right, and if we do not encourage it, we will never get what we want. We now have aeroplanes that can fly on biofuel; Virgin flew a plane across the Atlantic with one if its engines running on biofuel.
	I want the Government to take biofuels into account, and briefly, I put the following points to the Minister. If we are to have a level playing field for biofuel, the duty must be reduced. It should be reduced by the maximum amount allowed under European Union rules, which is 25 per cent. I would like to know whether the Minister supports that idea. Why not make 50 per cent. of the Government agency fleet eco-friendly vehicles, such as those that use biofuel? Why not exempt flex-fuel cars from the congestion charge? Why not give free parking to people who use biofuel cars, or low energy emitting cars?

Malcolm Wicks: Ask Boris.

Peter Bone: I am sure that the Mayor of London is listening to this debate with great interest. Finally, why not encourage companies to have biofuel pumps on their sites? If we are to encourage biofuel use, it is completely hopeless that there are only 19 biofuel stations in the country.

Charles Hendry: This has been an important, but somewhat brief debate. Nevertheless, we have covered good ground during the course of it. We have heard important contributions from a number of colleagues, and I give my sympathy to those colleagues who hoped to be called to speak, but did not have the chance to do so. I pick out in particular the comments of the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood), because it is clear from those remarks that a lot of common ground is developing between the parties, although there are matters that still divide us. When there is such cross-party agreement, which the Government could work with, it seems all the more strange to many of us that they choose to stand in its way.
	The hon. Member for Barnsley, Central (Mr. Illsley) rightly highlighted the cost to business and consumers of energy prices. Just a few years ago, our industrial energy cost 15 per cent. less than the European average, and today it is 15 per cent. more. That difference is getting greater, so a real issue is at stake. Companies, such as the one in the hon. Gentleman's constituency to which he referred, are facing the risk of closure because they can no longer afford to manufacture in this country. That is a matter of profound concern. Just as, a few years ago, business was moving abroad because of cheap labour, we now face the risk of business moving around the world to where it can get cheap energy.
	However, it should be pointed out that consumers in this country were charged, until very recently, the lowest energy prices in Europe, one of the reasons being the liberalisation of British energy markets. The response to price rises should not be to move back to nationalisation, as the hon. Member for Barnsley, Central seemed to suggest, but to push the rest of the EU to liberalise its markets. The hon. Member's final point was the most telling of all; he said that it was not for the Opposition to show leadership—although I think that we are—but for the Government to do so. That has been missing from this debate.
	My hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) spoke of international comparisons and explained how we are lagging behind precisely because the Government have not made the tough decisions that are so important. He also made clear the real battle that will be fought in a number of constituencies between the desire to move forward with renewables and the concerns about damaging unspoilt natural landscape. That real debate is one which we should have in this House.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, South (Mr. Binley) spoke with great passion about carbon capture and storage, and he rightly highlighted the lack of vision and the lack of a sense of urgency that we have seen from the Government. My hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) made interesting points about biofuels. One of the concerns expressed about using them in aeroplanes is that, using current technology, biofuels freeze at altitude, which is not desirable in an aeroplane. More work needs to be done on that, but the most important issue is the one raised by the hon. Member for Cheltenham—sustainability. Biofuels can make an important contribution as long as they are produced in a sustainable manner.
	I was particularly struck by the speech of the Secretary of State, which was unusual because it contained a joke—perhaps it will read better in  Hansard than it sounded in the House. When he was talking about Conservative energy policy, it was a bit like listening to the Monty Python routine, "What have the Romans ever done for us?" We have called for nuclear power without subsidy, for more resources for the nuclear installations inspectorate, for type and site approval, for changes in the planning system to allow for local democracy to be involved and for the Government to push towards a long-term waste disposal strategy. Putting that aside, however, what else is in the Conservatives' policy? We have said that there should be a cap and trade system, we have called for smart meters to encourage microgeneration—

John Hutton: Hardly.

Charles Hendry: The Secretary of State says, "Hardly", but we did it well ahead of the Government. We pushed for feed-in tariffs and for changes to the national grid to allow for priority access, and we want to look at the way in which Ofgem operates to see what more can be done to encourage renewables. We have called for more carbon capture and storage projects and for more general gas storage because we are concerned about the national lack of storage. We have pushed the Government to reform the renewables obligation certificate system to allow for banding. We have not called in any Conservative policy document for ROCs to be scrapped.
	We called for a heat strategy, and we called for energy efficiency and fuel poverty to be dealt with in the Energy Bill, but the Government refused. We have pushed for more energy to be derived from waste, and we wanted more information for consumers on their CO2 emissions and their environmental charges. We wanted the public to know what contribution was made from their bills towards those charges. In spite of all that, the Secretary of State says, "Yes, but can you tell us what the Conservatives want in energy policy?" We could not have been clearer in showing the way, and it is unfortunate that the Government have been lagging.
	The greatest risk to our energy policy is the Government's failure to make long-term decisions. My hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Alan Duncan) and I are fans of much of what the Secretary of State has done. The nuclear industry and its potential investors will be profoundly concerned by the reports in yesterday's papers that the unions want him sacked in return for continuing to bail out the Labour party. He has been listening and he has been acting, but there remains a worry that there is no plan B if people choose not to invest in this country on the terms set out by the Government.
	Concerns arise relating to our energy security in other respects. On gas storage, there is no sense of urgency and no steps have been taken to put an increased number of gas storage facilities in place, even though we have some of the worst storage facilities in Europe. We have 10 or 12 days' worth of supplies, compared with 80 days in other countries. On carbon capture and storage, the Government ducked one of the great technological opportunities of this decade in opting purely for one technology. They said that they wanted to export the technology to China, but anyone who knows anything about the matter knows that the Chinese will be developing it, too, that they will be there by Wednesday of next week, rather than in 12 years' time, and that they will be considering how they can export it to us, rather than expecting to take it from us. The Government have turned away from one of the most exciting technologies, which will be a matter of shame for them for ever.
	Everyone believes that energy efficiency can make a fundamental contribution to our energy security. At the moment, only 40 per cent. of the properties of this country are effectively insulated. There was nothing in the Energy Bill to improve insulation. We charge 5 per cent. VAT on fuel, but 17.5 per cent. on energy-efficient measures to make our homes warmer. People tell us constantly that they are not getting the independent guidance that they need to determine which technology is right for their homes. The Government have held back and have not been sufficiently dedicated to the roll-out of smart meters. We could have sent a very clear message in the Energy Bill that we wanted every home in this country to have a smart meter within 10 years. They would help to tackle energy inefficiency and fuel poverty, and they are exactly the right way to go. The Government moved some way in that direction but were still not prepared to take the necessary key steps. They continue to run the low-carbon buildings programme, and when the money is used up within a few hours of being unveiled they say that that is a success, showing how popular the programme is, rather than a fiasco because people cannot get access to the support that they are looking for.
	We recognise the contribution that microgeneration can play, but the Government are still stalling its development by refusing to accept feed-in tariffs now because they want to consult more on them. That means that it will be years before we can take them forward as is necessary.
	We find perhaps the greatest complacency of all on renewables. We have heard about how the marine renewables deployment fund has not worked. The Minister has said on other occasions, "But look, we have almost as much tidal power and wave power as they have in Portugal." We have 11,000 miles of coastline, compared with 1,000 miles in Portugal. We should be leading, but we find that the new renewables strategy that the Government announced last week is not so much a strategy for success as a shocking admission of the Government's failure. We are third from bottom in the whole EU in the development of renewables. In spite of all the Government's fine words, we have simply not made progress.
	All that we get from this Government is consultations. There was a consultation programme on smart meters, and at the end of it their conclusion was that there should be three more consultation exercises. That is this Government's approach; rather than make decisions, they have a further consultation programme. That is simply not good enough.
	We are concerned about reliance on imported energy, which will include 80 per cent. of gas by 2020. That will lead to higher prices and less security. That is the challenge for the Government, and it is unprecedented, as we have heard in the debate. We are not getting the leadership that we need from this Government. Their legacy will be terrible in many areas, but the worst legacy of all will be that they have failed to make the key decisions. That will result in a loss of vital supplies, which in turn will lead to higher prices and, potentially, power cuts.

Malcolm Wicks: We have had a lively and wide-ranging debate, ostensibly about the security of the energy supply but in practice ranging very much wider. I shall start with energy security, which is a serious challenge.
	Our task is to ensure that we continue to have a secure and reliable supply of energy in a world in which global demand is growing rapidly and supply has struggled to keep pace. We have to import far more fuel than in recent decades, and energy resources are concentrated in certain regions, including the middle east and the former Soviet Union. Energy therefore becomes a vital component of our nation's security, not just because we need the supply but because we must ensure, through diversity, that our sources of supply do not affect our independent foreign policy on issues such as human rights. The energy security aspect of national security is vital.
	The imbalance between supply and demand affects prices. As we have heard, the price of oil has gone over $140 a barrel, having doubled in the past year. That has had knock-on effects on gas—wholesale forward gas prices have increased by more than 135 per cent. since June 2007—and on coal, with spot prices increasing by more than 150 per cent. since then; on electricity, whose price has more than doubled since June last year; and on petrol and diesel, whose prices are respectively about 35 per cent. and 25 per cent. higher than last year. Of course, that is affecting every household, motorist and business.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley, Central (Mr. Illsley) talked about prices and their impact on industry. We need to be careful when making comparisons, because they are quite complex. Indeed, available data suggest that for industry, gas prices for medium consumers were above the median in the UK, while prices for small and large consumers were below the median. Similarly, in the case of electricity, some people are better off than in Europe and some are worse off. I shall happily send my hon. Friend the detailed data.
	Of course, energy security cannot be seen in isolation but must be addressed in the context of the need to tackle climate change internationally. Global warming is, by definition, a global problem requiring global solutions. Domestically, and even individually, we need to tackle it by reducing demand and decarbonising our energy supply.
	Let us be careful about European comparisons. We have heard a lot about feed-in tariffs, but I do not think that any of the Members who spoke acknowledged the very important fact that per capita CO2 emissions are higher in Germany than in the UK. We must also be aware of some siren voices that argue that, faced with rising energy prices, we cannot now afford to tackle global warming. I judge that that would be the wrong signal at precisely the wrong time. We must rather pursue the most economical and cost-effective climate measures. Those are among the greatest challenges that Governments around the world face, and although there is no doubt that the current high prices place a strain on households, motorists and businesses, the UK is in a fundamentally strong position for the following reasons.
	First, I emphasise the policy strategy. Our policy of a diverse and increasingly low-carbon energy mix is surely the right way to ensure security of supply. I want to be absolutely clear about that, because one sometimes hears particular interests proclaim that one solution is the answer. Sometimes it is nuclear, sometimes it is renewables. Those voices are surely mistaken. Putting all our energy eggs in any one basket would seriously reduce our nation's security.

John Redwood: Will the Minister give way?

Malcolm Wicks: I beg the right hon. Gentleman's pardon; I do not have time. I heard his earlier comments, which were interesting. Turning our back on coal and encouraging a new dash for gas would be foolish and against diversity, and it would certainly not help our nation's security.
	Secondly, we have taken, and continue to take, the tough decisions required for the long term, including our decision in January in favour of new nuclear power stations and our proposals last week for a massive expansion of renewable generation by 2020. I listened carefully to the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald), who was passionate about the need for renewables, but not in his own constituency. That is surely the problem. I often meet Members who support renewables in the Chamber but are opposed to them when it comes to proposals in their own backyard.

Oliver Heald: Will the Minister give way?

Malcolm Wicks: The hon. Gentleman has already expressed that approach, and I cannot now give way to him.
	The hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) talked about the importance of biofuels, and I agree that they are important. The Gallagher review, which will examine the issue of sustainability, will be published very shortly. We have announced today proposals that will push forward carbon capture and storage—a vital technology in the fight against climate change. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State noted that we have published today a consultation document on CCS. Although that consultation is ongoing, we intend to continue to process power station applications and take decisions under section 36 of the Electricity Act 1989.  [Interruption.] I judge that there is an appetite for CCS, but along only with Norway and possibly the United States, we are one of the leading nations in the whole world on it. It is right to have had a proper competition to decide who should build the demonstration projects, but apparently some on the Opposition Benches say that we should have simply given the contract to one company that had a proposal. That would have been wrong, and it was absolutely right that we went for post-combustion technology because of its application to China.
	Some interest was expressed in marine funding for wave and tidal power. We are interested in that, but I warn hon. Members that it is new technology and not an alternative to wind. We have spent a great deal of money on research and development and we hope that two projects will be funded through the marine deployment fund this year. It is a deployment fund, not a science fund, and when the technology is ready, we want to spend the money. However, it is clear that we cannot do that until the technology is ready for deployment.
	We are making the tough decisions on renewables and nuclear. We need to do more about energy efficiency and we will. I repeat that I am proud that we are one of the leading nations in the world on carbon capture and storage. We take the nation's security, and therefore energy security, most seriously. We are tackling the biggest challenges of all—climate change and global warming. We are mindful of the social aspects and the need to protect our most vulnerable citizens against rising prices. We have one of the most sophisticated social policies on tackling climate change.
	I judge that the Opposition have an appetite to hear more from me and I am happy to comply. We need to be consistent about planning. The Opposition spokesman talked about gas storage. Our planning system is one of the barriers to gas storage and we therefore introduced the Planning Bill, which the Opposition opposed. One cannot talk about the ends without willing the means. The Planning Bill is the means and will enable us, while always taking account of public opinion, especially local public opinion, to make the necessary decisions speedily.
	Let me deal with nuclear—I am happy to discuss the subject of the debate all night.

Oliver Heald: The Minister criticised me for saying that it was wrong to put three wind turbines in a small valley in Hertfordshire with a domestic landscape. Is he aware that landscape is one of the most important aspects of the planning systems in Scotland and France? It is mentioned in their planning notes. Will he take note of what is done in Scotland and France when deciding where wind turbines should go?

Malcolm Wicks: I take note of what happens all over the world. I cannot comment on the projects that the hon. Gentleman mentions because I do not know the details, but he may wish to listen because I gave way to him. Given that we have an hour or so of the debate to go, I shall give way to anyone who would like to intervene. However, I was gently chiding the hon. Gentleman because he made a passionate plea about the importance of renewables and I believe that he was gently criticising the Government for our policy. However, he then got most passionate in saying that the projects should not be in his constituency. That is the problem.

John Redwood: When does the Minister believe that the first new nuclear power station under the Government's plans will open? Will it be agreed under their new planning system? How long will it take, given that there is to be two more years' delay before setting it up?

Malcolm Wicks: I recall how many power stations were built under the Administration of whom the right hon. Gentleman was a distinguished member. I listen to the talk, but I also look at the record, and I find one more impressive than the other. On a cautious estimate, the first new nuclear power station should be up and producing clean and green energy by 2020—some optimists say 2017-18.

Peter Bone: The Minister did not deal with my earlier comments about his banging his head against the bedroom door and the European Union's failure to liberalise its energy policy. On many occasions, he has promised that the EU would liberalise—when will it happen?

Malcolm Wicks: I do not know how up to date the hon. Gentleman is with the recent Luxembourg meeting of Energy Ministers that I attended, where legal unbundling was agreed. We did not get all the unbundling that we wanted, and we will continue to press for full liberalisation, but it was a significant step forward, of which we can be proud.

David Hamilton: There was a question earlier about nimbys in England. I assure my hon. Friend that there are as many nimbys in Scotland as in England, irrespective of the planning system in Scotland. Members of the Opposition parties are the very people who behave like that, yet they always profess to be in favour of renewable energy.

Malcolm Wicks: Let us be clear: when there are good environmental or other reasons for saying no to a project—a power station or a wind farm—the answer should be no. That is right and proper. However, we must say yes if we want energy security and if we wish to tackle global warming. That is why the not-in-my-backyard people need to be faced down.

Andrew Robathan: rose—

Malcolm Wicks: I am happy to give way to the eminent Whip.

Andrew Robathan: rose in his place and claimed to move, That the Question be now put.
	 Question, That the Question be now put,  put and agreed to.

Question put accordingly, That the original words stand part of the Question:—
	 The House divided: Ayes 183, Noes 279.

Question accordingly negatived.
	 Question, That the proposed words be there added,  put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 31 (Questions on amendments), and agreed to.
	Mr. Deputy Speaker  forthwith declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	That this House acknowledges that the Government is addressing the recent sharp increases in fossil fuel prices, which reflect an imbalance between supply and demand in global markets, through international engagement; recognises that the UK has the most competitive energy markets among the G7 nations, as recognised by independent analysts; acknowledges the Government's success in establishing a market framework which encourages sharp increases in gas import and storage capacity; further acknowledges the Government's success in establishing a clear framework for investment in new nuclear generation capacity through the Nuclear White Paper, and in setting out a blueprint for a historic expansion of renewable generation through the Renewable Energy Strategy consultation; recognises the Government's work in promoting energy efficiency as an integral part of its strategy; commends the Government's efforts to counter fuel poverty through the Winter Fuel Payment and through securing major financial commitments from energy supply companies; notes the Government's support for microgeneration; recognises that the Energy, Climate Change and Planning Bills will provide a legislative framework that is fit for purpose in changing market conditions and that supports the Government's policy objectives; believes that the Opposition's failure to show clear leadership on energy could put at risk Great Britain's energy security; condemns their failure to support the Government's Renewables Obligation; and deplores their opposition to the Planning Bill, which will provide greater certainty for major infrastructure building and help secure Great Britain's future energy independence.

Food Security

Mr. Deputy Speaker: I have to inform the House that Mr. Speaker has selected the amendment tabled in the name of the Prime Minister. Will Members who are not staying for this debate please leave quickly and quietly?

James Paice: I beg to move,
	That this House notes with concern current food shortages which are believed to have pushed 100 million people into hunger worldwide; recognises that rising food prices are putting household budgets under increasing strain; believes that with rising global demand and pressure on supply it is both a practical and moral imperative that Great Britain retains the capacity to produce a significant proportion of its own food; notes that UK self-sufficiency in food has declined considerably over the last decade; regrets the Government's failure to accept that domestic production is a necessary condition for food security; and urges the Government to relieve pressure on world markets and ensure the security of domestic food supply by enabling British farmers to optimise food production while preserving the natural environment.
	At the outset, may I remind the House of my entry in the Register of Members' Interests?
	A few weeks ago in the Chamber, I challenged the Secretary of State on the subject of food security. In his answer, he asked for a discussion on the right things to do in response to the changing circumstances. I hope that he will use this debate to make a contribution to those discussions.
	Three years ago, the most significant reform of the common agricultural policy since its inception took effect. The so-called mid-term review began the process of cutting the link between how much a farmer produced and how much public money he or she received. In England, the Government quite rightly decoupled totally. Many other countries did so only partially. It is ironic, however, that the price of the two basic commodities at the heart of the present rise in food prices—grain and milk—has risen because of global markets. So, far from having cheaper food as a result of ending production subsidies, the market has conspired to raise prices. The two aspect are not linked; it is a coincidence, but it demonstrates that we should not make rash assumptions about something as unique as food production. Farming cannot be switched on and off like a car plant. That is why this debate is so important.
	Why are we concerned? First, we are concerned because of the considerable rise in global food prices, to which I shall return. The second reason is the impact of those price increases on consumers, both here and in the developing world. The price of wheat has risen by up to 150 per cent., but that does not explain the rise in retail prices. For example, in the past two years the price of an average 800 g loaf of bread has risen by almost 30p, but the rise in the price of wheat accounts for less than 10p of that rise. We recognise that the rise in fuel prices has hit everyone, but we have to ask how that total price rise is justified. I suggest that if the price rise had been less than 10p, there would have been much less fuss. The same applies to milk: in the past 12 months, the retail price of a 4-pint bottle has risen by about 11p a litre, but the farm-gate price has risen by just 7p a litre. So in his quite proper concern about inflation, the Chancellor must look at the whole picture.
	We all know the basic reasons for the rise in commodity prices. They include the drought in Australia, which has reduced the harvest by 60 per cent., and the increasing demands of China and India, both for grain itself and for animal protein partly raised on grain. In China, for example, meat consumption has risen by 150 per cent. in 30 years. They also include biofuels. Views differ about the scale of the impact of biofuel production. The United States Government claim that about 3 per cent. of the price rise is due to biofuels; the International Monetary Fund puts it at nearer 30 per cent. The fact remains, however, that the United States is pouring money into ethanol production, which is due to rise from 5 billion gallons in 2005 to 10 billion in 2009. That production is using corn that would previously have been sold on the world markets.
	Of course, some of these factors could change. Australia could go back to full production, but I have to say that the picture is not encouraging. If we take a medium to long-term look at supply and demand, we see the world population rising by about 1 billion in the next 10 years, and by perhaps 3 billion by 2050.
	We must also consider climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that a 1 m rise in sea level would swamp a third of the world's crop land. That is possible before the end of this century. It is perfectly true to say that there is unused land in the world. For example, some 20 million hectares in Russia and Ukraine have been taken out of production since the end of the Soviet Union. However, it is estimated that some 10 million hectares of farmland around the world are lost each year to urbanisation, deforestation and desertification. The background is not encouraging. World cereal stocks have gone down consistently by 17 per cent. over the past five years.
	I put it to the House that we should take our future food supply—including the share of it produced in this country—seriously. The question is: do the Government do so? In December 2005, a joint policy document produced by the Treasury and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs called "A Vision for the Common Agricultural Policy" made the astonishing statement that
	"domestic production is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for food security".
	Let me be clear: no one is suggesting that it is sufficient—we have not been self-sufficient for many centuries—but surely we cannot suggest that it is not necessary. Are the Government really suggesting that it does not matter whether there is any domestic production at all? In the past six weeks, I have challenged the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister in the House to disown that document. Neither of them has done so. It is true that both have made noises about the importance of British farming, but, as I shall show, they have done nothing of significance.

Tim Farron: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that Natural England recently produced a manifesto for the countryside, in which it stated that too much of Britain's countryside was being farmed? However, we now have the lowest milk yields in history and farmers are leaving the fells because of their inability to make a living. Will the hon. Gentleman seek to correct the Government's perceptions, which are based on their quango's manifesto?

James Paice: I hope that this debate will succeed in correcting that impression, which has been given by the Government and by Natural England.

Angela Browning: Is my hon. Friend aware that a former permanent secretary at DEFRA volunteered the information to the Public Accounts Committee that, following 9/11, officials approached Government Ministers at the time when the right hon. Member for Derby, South (Margaret Beckett) was Secretary of State to suggest to DEFRA officials that, in the light of that event, the Department should consider the minimum amount of self-sufficiency in this country? They were told by Ministers that that was not necessary.

James Paice: My hon. Friend is entirely right. I am very much aware of that statement. Of course, it was the right hon. Member for Derby, South (Margaret Beckett) who signed the statement to which I have just referred. If the Secretary of State is to achieve anything tonight, I hope that he will start by publicly stating that he has ditched that policy.
	Of course, there will be those who say that there is special pleading by farmers, but I want to assure the House that there is not. There are many reasons why hon. Members want to see a vibrant and productive agricultural industry, but the real reason—which I hope the Secretary of State will agree with—is very important. In a world in which supply and demand are now at best in balance, increasing demand will push up prices. As part of the projected population rise to which I have referred, it is predicted that Africa's population will more than double by 2050. No matter how much production in Africa can be increased by husbandry, political stability and technology, that continent will still be buying vast quantities of food on the world market. We, as a relatively rich country, might well be able to meet our needs, but we will be competing head to head with the poorer countries. Where is the morality in that? Increasing domestic production is not selfish; in fact, it is quite the opposite.
	Before turning to what needs to be done, let us look at the recent past and the reality behind the Government's claims. In the past 10 years, there has been a steady trend: production of all major food items has declined in this country. Cereal production has declined by some 19 per cent., meat production by 17.5 per cent. and milk production by 5 per cent. Overall, our contribution to indigenous food in our market has fallen from 81.8 per cent. in 1997 to 73.9 per cent. last year. That is the 74 per cent. to which the Government refer in their amendment to our motion.
	It is laughable that the Government's amendment claims that we are somehow okay because we are doing better than we were in the 1950s. The Secretary of State—or whoever drafted the amendment—seems to ignore the fact that the population of the world has more than doubled since then, and that it has risen dramatically in Britain. He might just as well have cited the 1930s, when we were really in a deep depression. The figures were even worse then, and today's figures would look even better by comparison.

Stephen O'Brien: I am listening to my hon. Friend's excellent speech, which is putting our domestic production in context and dealing with the problems faced not least by dairy farmers in my constituency. Does he agree that whenever this country has most needed to be competitive and to look to its strengths, it has recognised that food production is a strategic industry, which makes it worth investing in to ensure that we remain competitive as well as to contribute to a degree of self-sufficiency in our own land?

James Paice: I entirely agree with my hon. Friend and I will come on in a few moments to what needs to be done to achieve the status of food security that I believe is necessary.
	Overall, we produce only about 60 per cent. of all our food, and the food, feed and drink trade deficit has now widened to £14 billion. No doubt the Secretary of State will point out that last year's figure for self-sufficiency was marginally higher than in 2006. Of course that is good, but unless he can assure us that it marks the beginning of a completely new trend, it is pretty meaningless. If I had used the 2006 figures in my calculations, the overall figure would have been even worse than the one I have just given.
	What is behind the dramatic fall in our self-sufficiency? Essentially, it is all about profitability. In the period 1998 to 2007, food prices rose by just 20 per cent. against overall inflation of 32 per cent. This year, of course, it is different, but throughout that decade, food prices failed to keep up even with inflation. More importantly, the farmers' share of the food pound—in other words, the proportion of the retail price actually taken by the farmer—has declined by 20 per cent. over the decade. That has shown itself as a fall of 86,000 in the work force over the same period.
	Let me now turn to what needs to be done if we are to halt and reverse the downward trend and to achieve greater food security by ensuring that we have the capacity to produce enough to meet the majority of our needs. Of course we will produce surpluses in some products and we will trade them for those that we need to import. It has been like that for many decades, and it will always be so. Unless we have that strong domestic level of production, it will be to the detriment of the developing world that we are buying our food.
	There will be those who believe I am about to seek a return to protectionism. Precisely the opposite is the case. Those who advocate a protectionist regime and who want to cling to subsidies, including some leading agriculturists in Europe, are wrong. The real answer lies in fair and free competition—something that patently does not exist at present. We need further reform of the common agricultural policy to make it sustainable and stable. How can our farmers invest if they do not know the shape of any future policy in what is now just four years ahead?
	The health check proposals on the table at the moment are, in our view, wholly inadequate. We need a phased programme to shift all funding from direct payments to development funds. We need to see full decoupling across all products in all member states. We need a programme to dismantle all the remaining trade-distorting support; and we need to see a programme of increasing co-financing by member states so that those who want to increase expenditure pay for it. The sooner we can achieve such a stable policy, the sooner our farmers will be in a position to make their long-term plans.
	In the meantime, there are things that the Government should do or, in some cases, undo. First, we have to lift the burden of regulations. We know the Government's rhetoric and I am sure that the Secretary of State will use it in his speech, but I have to tell him that in the past five years we have seen a net increase in DEFRA regulation of about 20 per cent. a year. Whereas in 2002, one regulation was revoked for every two new ones, last year it was just one scrapped for eight new ones. It is not just a matter of numbers. Some regulations are necessary, but how they are applied is the important thing. There is no justification for the continued gold-plating of EU regulations; it should be removed if we are to have the free and fair competition that I mentioned.
	The legion of inspectors who turn up on our farms needs to be slashed and, in some cases, merged. Even more importantly, however, it is the culture that has to change. In France, a farm inspector sees his job as helping the farmer to meet the regulations' requirements; here, it seems that the inspectors are on commission to see how many penalties they can impose.
	While on the subject of regulations, let me deal with two specific ones that are currently of considerable importance. First, the nitrates directive, which applies at the European level, is obsolete and far too prescriptive. There is no excuse at all for DEFRA to go beyond the minimum necessary to comply with it, while hopefully working to have it reformed. The idea of setting in statute what will effectively be national muck-spreading day is ludicrous. It is compounded by the Prime Minister's decision when he was Chancellor to abolish the agricultural buildings allowance, which would have been of some help in meeting the £50,000 or so estimated costs to the average dairy farmer.

Daniel Kawczynski: My hon. Friend is talking about regulations. I can tell him that certain agricultural companies in my constituency are sending employees to eastern Europe to undertake some training because the regulations are so over-imposed in this country, but not in other EU countries.

James Paice: I am very much aware of my hon. Friend's immense support as chairman of the all-party dairy farmers group. I am not surprised to hear what he has to say.
	Let me refer to the proposed pesticides strategy, which I understand the Secretary of State spoke against last week. I am grateful that he did, but I understand that he did not vote against it. No doubt he will wish to explain that. At its worst, this strategy could reduce grain production by more than half, not just in the UK but throughout Europe. So much for food security. I find it unbelievable, but some pest control products that are to be banned on account of this strategy are actually allowed by organic farmers. These pesticides—copper sulphate and the natural pyrethroids, for example—are so safe that the organic movement allows them, yet they are to banned by Europe.

Peter Atkinson: The pesticides directive would make it difficult to grow many vegetables, including potatoes, carrots and other root vegetables, quite apart from cereals. Indeed, they would be made virtually uneconomic in this country.

James Paice: What my hon. Friend says applies across the whole sphere of what we might call horticulture and field-scale vegetable production, as well as fruit. The size of the market is such that, in the absence of the present products, it is very unlikely that any company will go to the expense of developing replacement products.

Stephen O'Brien: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way to me a second time. One of his examples was the NVZ—nitrate vulnerable zone—regulations. Is he aware that the cost of gold-plating is met on the ground, when farmers have to go to the expense of digging their pits and fencing them to ensure that they are not a danger—even though someone falling in would be trespassing on their land? The real issue is seen in my constituency, where the river Weaver has for the last 12 years recorded reduced nitrate levels in the water from the natural fall-off, yet the farmers have to meet this enormous expense for a nitrate problem that does not exist.

James Paice: My hon. Friend makes an important point. We all know that nitrates in water can be caused from run-off of recently applied chemicals, but we also know that they can have a very long historic lead-in. Some work has been done in Rothwell in Lincolnshire to show that nitrate levels in water can reflect actions taken decades or even centuries ago. It is therefore very short-sighted to rely solely on the current situation.
	Since my hon. Friend has referred us back to the NVZ proposals, it is worth pointing out that I challenged the Secretary of State only a couple of weeks ago about this problem and the gold-plating issue. I heard various sotto voce comments to the effect that there was no gold-plating in the proposals, but I have to tell the Secretary of State that there is— [Interruption.] I would be delighted if he intended to drop them, but let me give him one example—the requirement to have cover crops on the land all through the winter. That is not in the directive, and if the Government are going to drop it, I know that most farmers would be very pleased to hear it, but let us not hear any profession that there is somehow no gold-plating in the drafting.
	I could add many other issues to do with double-tagging of sheep, electronic identification and many more, but unless there is a clear benefit to be gained from a regulation, it is pointless. I question considerably the need for them, but the key point in this debate is that all those things restrict farming's ability to increase production.
	Let me move on to animal welfare. We in this country rightly pride ourselves on having some of the highest standards, but equally we must look hard at the standards used in food production overseas. There is no point in raising standards at home only to destroy our own producers by importing produce reared under less humane, and therefore perhaps less expensive, standards.
	In the long term, such issues could be, or should be, addressed in the world trade talks, but in the short term we must ensure that the consumer knows the full facts. However, food labelling law does not allow that. Apart from beef and honey, there is no obligation for food to be labelled with the true country of origin: that can either be avoided altogether or the label can merely represent the place where the food was last processed. So, British ham or pork may not be from a British pig. If that were to be corrected, our industry could properly market its strengths, but there is one customer whose buying power is greater than that of any other—the Government.
	About £2 billion of taxpayers' money is spent on food and drink by the Government and their Departments and agencies, yet the proportion of it that is British is woeful. Only 5 per cent. of NHS orchard fruit is British. The Ministry of Defence sources absolutely no British bacon. There are many other pathetic examples. Of course, Ministers will say that we are not allowed to insist on British products. That is true, but there is nothing wrong whatever with insisting that products are produced to British standards. What hypocrisy we have in a Government whose Ministers regularly proclaim the little red tractor as a logo demonstrating good-quality food, but who are complicit in spending taxpayers' money on food that is not produced to those self-same standards.
	On animal health, the Government have consulted on sharing the cost of disease control. That is not a bad idea at all until we realise that, in its current form, it means that farmers should pay the cost of DEFRA's mistakes. It is no coincidence that the proposal appeared just after last year's foot and mouth chaos. True cost sharing can work only if there is genuine sharing of decision making and planning for disease control, and if the Government recognise their unique responsibilities. They are the only organisation who can properly protect our borders against illegal meat imports and the disease risk that they bring. It is estimated that an average of some 12,000 tonnes of illegal meat comes in each year.
	The Government must also deal with the crisis of bovine tuberculosis. After 11 years of almost total inaction, there is no prospect of the disease coming under control. Indeed, it is getting worse. On figures for this year so far, we can see that 40,000 cattle have been slaughtered compared with just 28,000 last year. What a waste. What a tragedy for the farmers who see their breeding programmes disrupted and their businesses driven to the wall.
	The Government know what has to be done: there must be a comprehensive programme, as we have spelled out before, but it must include addressing the reservoir in wildlife. We on the Conservative Benches want to see healthy wildlife alongside healthy cattle, but in parts of the country we have neither, while we have a Secretary of State who seems to want to compete with the Prime Minister as chief ditherer.
	Finally, the Government have a responsibility—

Roger Williams: I agree with the hon. Gentleman that we have to deal with the reservoir in wildlife. The question is how we deal with it. Perhaps he will give us his thoughts.

James Paice: I recommend that the hon. Gentleman read the report of the Select Committee of which he is a member. His own Committee has produced part of the answer and I have spelt it out on many an occasion. I am happy to do so again on some other occasion. Going through the whole programme would take a long time—

Jonathan R Shaw: So that is a no, then.

James Paice: No, it is not a no at all. I strongly support the Select Committee proposals, which demonstrate a way forward. The key thing is that we must tackle the reservoir in wildlife. That, of course, is code for badgers. There is no point in hiding that. We need to look at selectively culling badgers in the hot-spot areas. That is one of the proposals made by the Committee of which the hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Mr. Williams) is a member.

David Curry: I sensed that my hon. Friend was drawing to a conclusion when he used the word "finally". There are two issues that, up to now, he has not mentioned and I would be grateful for an idea of his views on them.
	First, the words "genetically modified" have not yet crossed my hon. Friend's lips. What scope might there be to assist global production with that technology, and should British farmers have that piece of equipment in their toolkit? Secondly, the Government will have to address the big issue of how environmental schemes will continue to be funded at a time of rapidly rising commodity prices, which have changed entirely the economics for farmers. For example, we no longer have set-aside. What are his thoughts on that crucial issue? None of us wants to return to the intensive production methods that are now a generation old.

James Paice: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, who will not be surprised to hear that there are a lot of issues that I have not included in my speech, which would otherwise have been even longer, but I am happy to take him up on those two points.
	Our position on GM is quite straightforward. First, it has to depend on consumer demand. The ultimate decision must be taken by the consumer. We see the need for all GM developments to be considered individually. It is wrong to lump the whole GM debate together, because it depends on the merit or demerit of a particular development. There must be proper testing for food safety and environmental safety. We need to ensure that rules on crop separation, liability and such things are sorted. Subject to those requirements, GM crops have a role to play. Whether people want to grow those crops is up to them, as is whether they think there is a market for such production.

David Drew: Should they be allowed to?

James Paice: That is what I have just described. I will come back to the issue of funding, which was mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry).

Rob Marris: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who is being generous in giving way. He is right about UK food production being vital for the food security of our country—I certainly agree with him there—and I am interested to hear what he says about GM foods. Will he set out his party's policies on the controversial issue of biofuels? What policies should the Government pursue to adapt to the climate change to which he referred—adapting in a way that builds and increases our food security? What measures should be taken?

James Paice: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his support for some of the things I have said. The issue of biofuels has to be based on sustainability. It is clear in the Gallagher report of last week, or whenever it was, that they are not sustainable. In fact, we do not yet have the report; I am jumping the gun. I think we will find that the Gallagher report suggests that they are not sustainable. If you want to know where the leak happened, Mr. Deputy Speaker, it happened here. It is clear that sustainability is the key element, which is why we voted against the renewable transport fuels obligation. We believe that, at present, insufficient sustainability has been built in, but biofuels have a role to play and they should not be ditched completely if they can be made sustainable.

Andrew George: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

James Paice: I am conscious of having taken a lot of time, but I give way to the hon. Gentleman.

Andrew George: The hon. Gentleman has been extremely generous in giving way. He has mentioned buyer power, as well as the price of milk and the fact that the retail price was not being passed on to the producers. No doubt he will have followed the results of the Competition Commission report on the grocery sector, and will be aware that it recommended not only strengthening the supermarket code of practice, but introducing a supermarket, rather than a grocery sector, ombudsman. If such an ombudsman were introduced, that would surely do a great deal to assist farmers and food producers in this country, and surely it would help food security in the UK. Is that the policy of the Conservatives?

James Paice: If I had been able to return to my speech, my next sentence would have dealt with that issue, and I will return to the second point raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon.
	The Government have the responsibility to ensure that the market works fairly. As the hon. Member for St. Ives (Andrew George) has just pointed out, our supermarkets are all-powerful. They sell the vast majority of our food, and they will continue to do so. Those who think that if they shut their eyes the supermarkets will go away are fooling themselves. However, I believe that the balance of power is wrong. We are still awaiting the Government's response to the Competition Commission's proposals, which the commission said were in the interests of both farmers and consumers. Perhaps we are seeing even more dithering from the Government.
	As for the hon. Gentleman's idea about an ombudsman, self-regulation is closely involved in my party's approach to these matters. We are waiting to see whether the Government endorse the idea, and whether they are prepared to say that if the industry cannot set up its own regulatory system, they will set one up instead. In the meantime, we are not making much progress.

David Curry: rose—

James Paice: I have not yet answered my right hon. Friend's other question, but I am about to do so, if he will allow me.

David Curry: My point is about milk.

James Paice: In that case, I will give way.

David Curry: I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members' Interests.
	Does my hon. Friend accept that the Competition Commission's intervention in the price increase agreed by supermarkets for farmers some years ago has been entirely counter-productive? Supermarkets are now generally reluctant to contemplate increasing prices for farmers in case they are accused of complicity. The Food Standards Agency is having to broker an agreement with the competition authorities so that the dairy partnership can go ahead without the accusation that it is basically a price-fixing cartel.

James Paice: I can only agree with my right hon. Friend. I am well aware of the situation that he has described, and I think that he is entirely right. I know that the supermarkets were upset by the criticism, because they thought that they were acting with the noblest of motives. It is a matter of judgment whether they achieved their objective, but, as he says, that criticism has seriously affected their willingness to do anything to help the industry in the future.
	Let me say something about the environment, which is an important issue. Many people, including farmers, see it as an either/or issue. Farmers say to me, "Make up your mind: do you want us to produce food or do you want us to be park keepers?"—and use various other forms of vocabulary. I do not accept that interpretation. I believe that modern, efficient food production can be achieved alongside long-term care for our natural environment. There are many examples of good practice. Work by the organisation LEAF—Linking Environment And Farming—the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which has a demonstration farm on the edge of my constituency, shows that it can be achieved.
	Transferring resources to environmental and development programmes in the second pillar of the common agricultural policy will target funds on activities that yield no market income for the farmer. That is the only way in which we can address the important point made by my right hon. Friend. Payments for entry-level stewardship at £30 a hectare were fine when wheat cost £60 a tonne, but represent no form of compensational carrot now that it costs more than double that. Nowhere is such action more essential than in our hills and uplands, where the landscape has been fashioned by farmers. Tourists visit those areas and biodiversity is considerable, yet economic and, indeed, social existence is often exceptionally fragile in a market economy. The need to recognise the contribution made in those areas is vital.
	Domestic food production has regained an importance that is unprecedented since the end of the second world war. That approach has been taken not for selfish or protectionist reasons, but to ensure that this country does its bit to increase world food supplies and to help to restrain price rises for the countries and consumers who can least afford them. That is what the people are increasingly asking for; it is what farmers want to do; and—true—the Government say that it is what they want to do. However, if the best the Government can do is say that we are doing better than we were in the 1950s, they know in their heart that they have failed.
	We will never produce enough to meet all our needs, nor should we try, especially as concern about total carbon footprints plays an increasing part in our lives, but there is no reason why we cannot produce enough to meet the significant majority of our needs. We have some of the best land in the world and some of the most technically advanced farmers, but we also have a Government who seem obsessed with regulation and centralisation, and who therefore hinder rather than help those who want to get on with their business.

Hilary Benn: I beg to move, To leave out from "House" to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:
	"notes with concern current food shortages which are believed to have pushed 100 million people into hunger worldwide; acknowledges the steps taken by the Prime Minister to encourage coordinated international action to address global food security; welcomes the additional UK contribution to the World Food Programme; recognises that rising food prices as a result of global pressures are affecting household food budgets; believes that with rising global demand Great Britain needs a strong farming industry able to produce a significant proportion of UK food; notes that UK self sufficiency stands at 74 per cent. for food which can be grown in the UK, which is higher than in the early 1950s; and commends the Government's role in helping to develop a domestic farming sector that produces what consumers want in a way that preserves natural resources and enhances the valuable environmental benefits that it provides to society.".
	I welcome the opportunity to debate food security. I also welcome the context of what was said by the hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice), if not all the content. I will take his contribution in the spirit in which it was offered. I think that we need both to understand what is happening and why it is happening, and to agree what we should do in response, both internationally and at home.
	Let me begin with the international aspect. As the hon. Gentleman said, the last 12 months has seen a remarkable increase in food prices across the globe. Demand for food has increased, one reason being the fact that more people in emerging economies are becoming better off. The world's population is growing: by 2050, there may be another 2.5 billion mouths to feed on this planet of ours. Drought and changing weather conditions have hit yields. High energy prices, poor harvests in some places, speculation, biofuels and export bans have all pushed up prices. We have seen food riots in Haiti, Cameroon and Mexico. The whole House will be concerned about the fact that those price increases are pushing millions of people in the developing world further into poverty and hunger.
	Despite the unprecedented prosperity in our world, it should weigh heavily on each and every one of us that even before the recent increases in food prices, 850 million people on the planet did not have enough food to eat every day, and that every five seconds, somewhere in the world, a child dies because it does not have enough to eat. Lives are lost for want of enough food, yet there is enough food in the world for everyone; it is just that the poorest cannot get enough of it, either because they have not enough money to buy it or because other circumstances deny them access to it. I shall say more later about the question of the future.
	It is not for nothing that Josette Sheeran, who heads the World Food Programme, has described what has been happening as "a silent tsunami". The United Kingdom, along with others, has responded, giving a further £30 million to the World Food Programme's emergency appeal. There is, however, a fundamental problem, which was referred to by the hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire: the need to increase production in the developing world. The Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that global food production needs to rise by 50 per cent. by 2030 and to double by 2050 to meet the demands of a growing world population.

David Drew: It is good to hear that the World Food Programme is putting more resources into Sudan, a country that my right hon. Friend and I know very well. Sadly, what we do not hear is that before the latest increase, the amount of resources given to the World Food Programme had been drastically cut. There may be reasons for that, but we never hear those silent voices. It is vital for us not only to play our part and make our own contribution, but to ask other countries to make their contributions too, in terms of not just words but actions.

Hilary Benn: I agree. Like a number of other countries, the United Kingdom has a long and honourable tradition of not just talking about what needs to be done, but putting money into it. I can say from my long experience of dealing with the World Food Programme that it is an outstanding organisation which delivers the most practical assistance to our fellow human beings in times of need. However, it deals with short-term emergencies. The question is: how are we going to increase global food production in what is literally a changing climate, because farmers throughout the world will have to contend with unreliable water supplies and the increasing frequency of droughts and floods? Food production will be affected by climate change, but it could also contribute to climate change if the wrong agricultural policies are adopted. The common agricultural policy, and agricultural support policies in countries such as the United States of America, keep prices high domestically and do not help poorer countries in the global economy; dumping subsidised produce on local markets does not exactly encourage and help farmers in those countries to produce. All of that is why we need a deal through the World Trade Organisation Doha round, and it is why I agree 100 per cent. with what the hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire says about reform of the CAP through the health check. Indeed, at the recent meeting of the Agriculture Council I made the point about what we in the UK have done in decoupling. I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman's support, but the problem is that there are others in the European Union who have to be persuaded that the path of reform is the right one to take.
	On pesticides, the UK, along with the Irish and one other country, appear to be the only nations that have done the work and identified the potential problem, which is why I spoke in the way that I did when this matter came up at the recent meeting of the Agriculture Council, and we will return to it.
	On nitrate vulnerable zones and the nitrates directive, I simply say to the hon. Gentleman that I would not have started from here, and nor would he; I suppose that this question should be addressed to those who agreed the nitrates directive all those years ago, but I think that the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, chaired by the right hon. Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack), got it right in its recent report. On labelling, the upcoming new EU proposals offer an opportunity to make progress on a number of points that the hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire raised.
	Looking beyond the recent price rises in global food commodities—which many commentators believe will come down from their peak, but will not return to where they were previously—we need to consider the future. Apart from giving more help to the World Food Programme, the UK—in the spirit of the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew)—has committed £120 million a year to boost agriculture in poor countries and £400 million over five years for international agricultural research, and Ban Ki-moon has taken an initiative with the taskforce, which is looking at a range of things that need to be done.
	Let me make one final observation on the international dimension: ultimately, good governance in countries has a hugely important influence on whether markets work successfully. Zimbabwe, for example, has in the space of 25 or 30 years gone from being the bread basket of Africa to a country that is incapable of feeding itself, not because of any factor except a monumental failure of governance.

Robert Key: Looking to the future, does the Secretary of State agree that we will depend on advances in science, technology and agriculture to a greater degree than ever, and that it would be absolute folly to reject GM technology both in Britain and in order to aid overseas problems, and that we should be increasing research in such technology and building confidence? We should, as my party spokesman has said, be careful not to dry up resources for science and research in this important area, both in terms of reducing insecticides and pesticides in our own crops and in producing drought-resistant crops in the rest of the world?

Hilary Benn: In responding to the scale of the challenge facing us in the fight against dangerous climate change and producing enough food for a growing world population, my view is very simple: we should look at all the means that are available, and we should not be afraid to ask questions. In relation to GM, we have to be able to provide answers to two questions that the public not unreasonably ask. First, they ask whether the product is safe to eat, and there is no evidence that it is not. Secondly, they want to know about the environmental impact of growing these crops. I recently gave approval to a trial that the university of Leeds wanted to undertake with a variety of potato. I am sorry to have to say that the trial has been trashed, and it is difficult to know the answers to the questions in those circumstances.
	One step that the EU could take is to speed up approval for new varieties to come in. Imported soya grown from GM sources is fed to a lot of livestock in this country, and therefore becomes part of the food chain.

Peter Atkinson: On the destroyed potato trial plot, it would help if the Secretary of State changed the Government's policy and did not publicise the addresses of those trial plots.

Hilary Benn: I intend to reflect upon that point. I think I am right in saying that this was the first trial to which I have given approval since taking up my current post. We need to find a way of answering the question, which, legitimately, everybody asks, because we should not be afraid of the answers, whatever they are; but those doing research into GM technology also need to be able to demonstrate that it can deliver some of the things that are sometimes claimed for it. That must be shown to be the case if GM is to be increasingly taken up.
	The question that goes to the heart of this debate is this: what do we mean by "food security"? I think the House would agree that it means people having, at all times, access to enough safe and nutritious food at a price they can afford. It also means having a food supply system that is reliable and resilient and able to withstand shocks and crises. In other words, we need to think about availability, access and affordability.
	We in the UK are not, of course, insulated from global price rises any more than anyone else is. We have seen the oil price rise to unprecedented levels—now almost $140 dollars a barrel, whereas a decade ago the price of a barrel was a tenth of today's price. We all feel the consequences of that in the shopping basket and on the forecourt when we fill up the car, and this is particularly difficult for households on low incomes, even though there has been a long-term decline in this country in the proportion of household budgets spent on food. The average household spends about 10 per cent. of its budget on food, whereas 10 years ago it was nearer 11 per cent. and 20 years ago it was 13 per cent.—and further back in time it was higher still. However, those averages hide the impact on those with less money. Low-income households currently spend about 15 per cent. of their household budget on food. The Government have been helping pregnant women through the Healthy Start programme, which provides free vitamin supplements and vouchers for essentials like milk, fruit and vegetables. We are spending about £100 million on that programme in Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
	I also know that the supermarkets are acutely conscious of the pressures these price rises have exerted on their customers' budgets, and in the last week or so we have seen signs of them responding. On a visit to any supermarket it is evident that our major grocery chains have been very successful in providing consumers with choice and a diversity of food products sourced from both this country and elsewhere around the world. Consumers have become highly sophisticated in choosing what to buy. There is also a growing network of farmers' markets and farm shops, as it is true that we as a society are becoming more interested in where our food comes from; the year of food and farming is in part about trying to educate more of our young people that food comes from farms, and does not grow in supermarkets, thereby informing the choices consumers make.

David Taylor: The Secretary of State will be aware that when addressing the National Farmers Union conference in February, the Prime Minister stated that its members had a core responsibility to grow and produce most of the food consumed by the British people. What proportion of food, by value, that is consumed by the British people is produced by British agriculture, and what proportion does the Secretary of State expect that to be in five and 10 years' time?

Hilary Benn: If my hon. Friend will bear with me a moment longer, I will come on to that point.
	The UK currently enjoys a high level of food security. Our food supply chain is, however, highly dependent on energy, and reducing that energy dependency will be very important in addressing the challenges we face. Our farming industry makes a very important contribution to our food supply by producing food that consumers want. I want—we want—a strong, thriving, successful farming industry, and in many respects the outlook is brighter than it has been for some years. Let me say to my hon. Friend that domestic production is necessary for food security, but it is not on its own sufficient.

Daniel Kawczynski: The Secretary of State is trying to paint a very rosy picture—that he is a friend of farmers—but is he not concerned about the large number of judicial reviews that the NFU is pursuing and the growing number of such reviews that it feels forced to pursue because it fundamentally disagrees with Government policy on so many things?

Hilary Benn: Well, we are a free society and individuals and organisations are perfectly free, by those means, to challenge decisions that the Government have taken. I should be very happy to discuss with the hon. Gentleman the particular context of some of those. We await judgments in those circumstances and we will of course be judged by the courts on the basis of the decisions that have been taken by the Government, but I do not accept the premise that the Government are somehow not trying to provide support. However, if one is talking about regulation, we are operating within a context where a lot of it comes from Europe, and it is indeed society itself that presses for that.
	Let me turn to the facts and individual products. Coming directly to the point about self-sufficiency, which my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) raised, milk and cereals production is about the same as it was 30 years ago, although it peaked in the early 1980s. It has gone up and down a bit. Self-sufficiency in vegetables has undoubtedly fallen from about three quarters to less than two thirds. Imports from the EU have risen sharply. Self-sufficiency in butter, on the other hand, has risen from just under one third to nearly two thirds over the past 30 years. Of the foods that can be produced in this country, we are about 74 per cent. self-sufficient and yes, it is true that that is higher than it was in the 1950s or, indeed, the 1930s. It is not as high as it was at the height of the CAP, and 60 per cent. of the food that we import comes from the European Union, which is itself about 90 per cent. self-sufficient in the food that it needs.
	Would it be sensible to make self-sufficiency a policy aim? What about exports, which are very important for the farming industry? If self-sufficiency means protectionism—the hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire said that he was not arguing for that—is that a desirable aim? We are a trading nation. We export as well as import food, and there are of course some things that we cannot possibly grow ourselves that we need to buy. What is more, feeding the population of the UK sustains a very large industry, not just agriculture, and some 3.7 million jobs. It accounts for 7 per cent. of gross domestic product, and for one fifth of UK greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, food manufacturing is the largest single manufacturing sector in the UK.

Kerry McCarthy: My right hon. Friend has talked about self-sufficiency but he has not really put that in the environmental context. Does he not agree that in this day and age, when this country produces food such as apples, it is absolute madness to incur the environmental consequences of importing apples from somewhere such as New Zealand?

Hilary Benn: In the end, consumers have a choice about what it is they wish to buy in those circumstances. Food security cannot be considered in isolation from the rest of the world. Part of the answer to the question that was raised earlier is that we need an open global trading system and an end to the distorting subsidies.

James Paice: I am very grateful to the Secretary of State, not least for the way in which he is addressing the subject. He rightly said earlier that I was not calling for protectionism, but does he also accept that I was not calling for self-sufficiency either? I specifically used the phrase "food security", which I defined as the capacity to produce the majority of our needs. We have never been fully self-sufficient and nobody is asking us to be.

Hilary Benn: I accept the point, and in asking the question—others have raised it, and I was not attributing that view to the hon. Gentleman—I think it important that we have thought through exactly the argument that he has put, so that we can answer it in relation to those who do say, "Should we not aim to be self-sufficient?" Then, we can get on to discussing what we mean by food security and what the right policies are.

Michael Jack: The right hon. Gentleman is correct to put this matter into an international context. At the world food summit, the Food and Agriculture Organisation secured its plan to address this issue, but at the same time, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, indicated that the UN was going to produce its own plan to deal with the same issue. The World Trade Organisation has an influence in terms of its market policy. The World Bank also has an influence and so does the European Union, yet so many delegations said, "We've talked about this ad nauseam over the last two decades, but what guarantees are there that we will have a course of action that will deliver the increase in food supply that we need?" What role are the UK Government going to play in trying to create coherence among all the players who have an influence on this subject?

Hilary Benn: The right hon. Gentleman makes a very important point. When one looks at the international system, one could describe a similar situation regarding a number of other issues, where there are lots of fingers in the pie. I do not mean that in a disrespectful sense, because those organisations have a view to express. Indeed, I was discussing this, in part, with the secretary-general of the OECD only this morning. I think that the answer would be that the UK will do what it has done on a number of other occasions—argue our corner to try to ensure that we have an effective international system.
	The single most important priority in improving production is the need to focus on Africa, because it has not experienced the green revolution that Asia went through. We must also consider issues such as getting governance right, markets, communications, water supply, access to seeds, lowering the cost of fertiliser, helping with transport and getting products to market. Some of the food grown in the developing world rots. The rats get it before anyone can eat it because the infrastructure is not there to get it from where it has been grown to where it needs to be. That is why progress on all those fronts is required if we are to solve the problem.

Bob Spink: The right hon. Gentleman is right to refer to the common agricultural problem as part of the —[ Interruption. ] Sorry, that was a Freudian slip; I meant to say that he is right to refer to the common agricultural policy as part of the problem. Does he agree that the common fisheries policy is also dysfunctional? If so—I guess that I will not get very far down this line—will he therefore explain why the Government's policy is not simply to withdraw from them? Given that the hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) is present and that apples have been mentioned, does the right hon. Gentleman understand that the demise of the honey bee will have a major impact on our agriculture and biodiversity, and what will he do about spending more money on research into that problem?

Hilary Benn: I understand that the policy that the hon. Gentleman has put forward is that of the party that he now plants his standard in; it is not the policy of either of the parties represented on the Front Benches. However, the sustainability of the world's fish stocks is a really important issue. If, in the end, we fish the seas out, we have all got an even bigger problem on our hands.

David Curry: Will the Secretary of State give way?

Hilary Benn: I will—for the last occasion, seeing as it is the right hon. Gentleman.

David Curry: May I invite the right hon. Gentleman, in response to the question that came from his back-bench colleague, to assert that trade is a good thing—that if we do not buy New Zealand apples, they may not buy our whisky, for example—and that the environmental damage of a long sea voyage is almost certainly a great deal less than that of the final bit by lorry from the port to the processor to the supermarket? Trade has done a huge amount to advance the cause of civilisation, and I hope that none of the Front Benchers is going to suggest that we should do anything but seek to promote it.

Hilary Benn: I happily say, since the right hon. Gentleman invites me to do so, that trade is indeed a good thing, which is why I have just told the House that we need an open global trading system. However, I also said to my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, East (Kerry McCarthy) that individuals have a choice. If they are going to eat apples, which lots of people do—doing so is very good for them—they can decide where they want their apples to come from.  [ Interruption. ] "Kent", says my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Jonathan Shaw) from a sedentary position—and who am I to argue with him?
	In bringing my remarks to a close, I want to come to the question whether our food supply is secure. Currently, the answer to the question is yes, both because we produce a lot of it ourselves and because we are able to buy the rest of the food that we need on the world market. Will the answer to the question be yes in the years ahead? The truth is, none of us can answer that question for sure, which is why this debate matters so much. We should therefore ask ourselves how we can watch what is happening and set up a system of warnings—if I might use that word—to alert us to changes that we ought to be worried about. That is the starting point for this debate. In the document that I promised the House at the last departmental questions, I intend to suggest what those warnings might look like. I intend to produce the document alongside the Strategy Unit's report on food, and I genuinely look forward to contributions. As a starter for 10, the things that we might want to watch include the overall global availability of food compared with population growth; the pattern of UK food imports and supply diversity; the changing patterns in domestic land use here and elsewhere in the world; the energy dependency in our food chain and food chain resilience; affordability of food, and especially whether low-income households can afford nutritious food; and public confidence in the food system to deliver. There will be many other suggestions—

Rob Marris: Will my right hon. Friend give way?

Hilary Benn: I will give way one final time in a minute, as it is my hon. Friend.
	What is striking about this debate is that all of us can think of things that we might need to worry about— [Interruption.] I did give way to the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski). However, the answers are not clear. While the hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire listed a series of things about which he wished to complain, his speech was light on answers. I do not say that because I doubt his ability, but because, in truth, all of us are trying to work out the right policy to adopt to respond to this issue.

Rob Marris: My right hon. Friend probably knows what is coming. One of the big factors that we have already had warning of is the change in climate to which he has adverted. Those changes will accelerate in the United Kingdom as well as elsewhere. I urge on my right hon. Friend a policy on food production and security in the UK that keeps a close eye on climate change, because it is one of the biggest issues facing UK agriculture.

Hilary Benn: I am happy to say that I agree completely with my hon. Friend. What is the best way to ensure our farming sector can meet this challenge? We need to support farming in producing food that consumers want in a way that maintains the natural resources on which farming and food production depend—the quality of the soil and the availability of water—and increases environmental resilience, because there is not a competition between the two. We need to be more aware of where our food comes from and how it is labelled and to find ways of producing food with much less dependence on fossil fuels. We also need to encourage farming to play its part in reducing emissions and to encourage the next generation of farmers to see the great opportunities that exist.
	One thing is beyond doubt, and that is that the world is going to need a lot of farmers and a lot of food over the next 50 years, and it is the job of every one of us to respond to that global challenge. The truth is that all our lives depend on us getting it right.

Roger Williams: I draw the House's attention to my declaration of interests in the register.
	In July last year, I asked the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Joan Ruddock), about food security, and she replied:
	"the hon. Gentleman knows that we are pretty confident about the position here because of the diversity of sources from which we draw our food supplies and our very effective international trade."—[ Official Report, 19 July 2007; Vol. 463, c. 417.]
	That was a fairly good answer, but what disappointed many of us was that there was no mention of British agriculture and the part that it can play in food security.

Daniel Rogerson: My hon. Friend makes a good point. I listened with interest to the Secretary of State, but I was disappointed that he did not focus a little more on that question and on the Government's role in at least ensuring that single farm payments are made in time to farmers who rely on them to invest in the sorts of things that we want to see— [ Interruption. ] The Secretary of State says from a sedentary position that the Government are making progress, but they recently had to revise downwards their estimation of how much they would be able to achieve. Although things are improving, they still have a long way to go.

Roger Williams: I thought that the Secretary of State was more encouraging towards British agriculture than I have heard him be recently. My hon. Friend makes the point about the single farm payment and what a sapping effect the problems with it had on the confidence of British agriculture and its ability to invest and carry on its business.
	The Secretary of State defined food security as having sufficient food and access to food unhampered by bad governance, substandard infrastructure or the inability to pay for that food. As several hon. Members have said, this is an issue not of self-sufficiency, but of security of supply and where we get food from. The issue is greatly affected by national agricultural output and European agricultural output. Indeed, the EU is a great exporter of food and is an important source for food security in the whole world. Many analysts of climate change predict that northern Europe will increase its importance in global food production.
	As an historical perspective on food production, I point out that in 1900 there were some 2 billion people on the planet; in just over a century we have increased to 6.5 billion. Food supply has kept up with that increase in population until very recent times because people have been innovative and engaged in research and experimentation. Mechanisation, plant breeding, fertilisers, agrochemicals and herbicides have all contributed to a great increase in food production, so much so that food prices have fallen in real terms over that period, especially in the past 20 years. That has been a big disincentive to investment in British agriculture. When I did my training, we were in the midst of the green revolution that did so much to bring improved food security to Asia, including the use of F1 hybrids and other technical developments. Many millions of people are alive in Asia today as a result of the improved food supplies provided by the green revolution. Many children have also gone on to better and more productive lives as a result.
	Individual food security is about not only sufficient calories, but sufficient vitamins, essential amino and fatty acids and minerals. We need not only food, but a range of foodstuffs that meets our nutritional needs. Where disasters have happened, it has often been a case not of insufficient food, but of an inability to get the food to people fast enough because of civil unrest, poor infrastructure or delays in transportation. The problem has been logistics failure rather than food shortage, but many people are undernourished. It has been estimated that their numbers have increased considerably as a result of the increase in food prices.
	Why is food security a hot topic and why does it cause concern for Britain and the British Government? The Government were initially sceptical about food security implications for Britain, or our responsibilities for the rest of the world. Britain's own food production has fallen as a percentage of our needs, and world food stocks recently reached an all-time low. Food on shelves and in store is likely to be inadequate if transport is disrupted, either by industrial action or by fuel shortages. Recent threats of industrial action have shown that food is spread so thinly across the nation that getting it to the shelves is a real issue, and it is one for which the Government must take responsibility. The Government's reaction was that although food production was falling in Britain as a result of decoupling, Britain was resilient because of its secure home base and diversity of supply. More work needs to be done on the resilience of the distribution network.
	Other factors have already been touched on this evening that have implications for food security: the possible increase in the population to 9.5 billion by 2050; the increase in wealth of India and China, as well as the fact that they eat and want foods of higher quality and cost; and the competition for land from biofuels, with all its implications in causing a tighter market for food supplies.
	What should the Government do and what can they do? First, it is a question of attitude. I call on Ministers to show more pride in British agriculture, to stand up for it and to be proud of what it has achieved in producing good, wholesome food over a long period and in ensuring that people in this country have access to that food and to variety. Secondly, Ministers should invest in the greatest resource in British agriculture—the men and women who work in it. There is too little demand for many agricultural courses in our colleges of further education. Let me give a little example. In my local agricultural college, which is in one of the biggest agricultural constituencies in England and Wales, only one person wants to go on to level 3. As a result, he will have to travel 50 or 60 miles to another college to take part in that training.

David Taylor: The hon. Gentleman asked Ministers to take a greater pride in British agriculture. Does he include in that their taking a more robust attitude in Europe in matters of labelling, for instance? It is absolute lunacy that pigs that are grown for slaughter and slaughtered in, say, Denmark can be brought to, say, Kent, processed and then presented on the supermarket shelves as a UK product. That is barmy, is it not? Why are we not taking the other EU nations to task on it?

Roger Williams: The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. We seem to have been talking about labelling for as long as I can remember. It would be a huge step forward for British agriculture, and for the Government in the eyes of British agriculture, if they could do more on the labelling question. It seems to me that the issues are relatively straightforward and that a little bit of determination and guts could lead to a success story.
	The Government could do more to promote the use of second generation biofuels. The problem with food security and biofuels comes from the first generation of biofuels, which involve making bioethanol from foodstuffs such as wheat. The second generation, which involves cellulosic enzyme technology, uses crop waste rather than foodstuffs. The Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Select Committee on Environmental Audit have both published reports that made that recommendation, yet the Government do not seem to be taking it forward. The next thing that the Government could do is invest in research into plant breeding, which might mean using genetic modification as a research tool.

Kerry McCarthy: Before the hon. Gentleman moves on from biofuels, let me say that although great emphasis is being placed on the fact that biofuels are increasingly taking up agricultural land and that that is forcing up food prices because of the scarcity of such land, is not another factor the fact that agricultural land is increasingly being used to grow soya that is then used as animal feed? Everyone knows that it takes 7 kg of grain to produce 1 kg of beef. Is that not as much of a factor as the fact that biofuels are being produced?

Roger Williams: The hon. Lady makes a good point. As we go on, in terms of global food security, we will have to look at how much food is eaten in vegetable and plant form and how much is eaten as meat. The ruminants do not have a good conversion factor in converting corn and soya into meat, but species such as pigs and chickens are relatively efficient. Two thirds of all agricultural land is grazing land and if we can use that land more efficiently to produce food in the form of meat, meat production still has an important part to play in food security. I do not think that people always realise that arable land takes up only one third of the total global agricultural land.
	By investing in research, the Government could do a great deal to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of agriculture in this country. By exporting that technology, they could do a lot for other countries, too. I referred earlier to the green revolution, which is an example of how research and technology can take forward production to an extent that is difficult to anticipate.
	The next issue is preventing waste, which the Secretary of State has already mentioned. More research and more investment in infrastructure and transport are needed. Some 30 per cent. of all food is wasted. Some is not even harvested, and some deteriorates in store. Much is wasted in processing and in retail when it is not sold during the time in which it is meant to be sold. It is wasted in the home, too. If only a small amount of that waste was used for its proper purpose as food, food security would be addressed.
	British farming must not be discriminated against by uncompetitive regulation. The hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) talked about pig production, and we have seen the pig herd in this country reduced by about a third or a half of its total. Part of the problem is that it has to compete against imports of pigs that are reared and produced in conditions that would not be allowed in this country. That is where labelling comes in. If the Minister and the Secretary of State can do anything for the pig industry in this country, they should ensure that imports meet the same standards and regulations as apply here.
	Mention has also been made of the situation in much of the EU, where full decoupling has not taken place. That puts British agriculture at a disadvantage, too. Some of the compliance cost for agriculture seems unnecessarily complicated and oppressive. Mention has been made of all the inspections. Yes, we must have a compliance system to ensure that public money is properly accounted for and spent, but some of the compliance requirements do not seem to go that way at all.
	Nitrate vulnerable zones have been mentioned. It is all very well for the Secretary of State to say, "I wasn't there when the agreement was made," but we have to deal with the issue now, and ensure that Britain is not disadvantaged while other countries are not made to sort out their difficulties— [Interruption]—or fined. There is another issue that the Secretary of State must take up during the mid-term review: the move towards pillar two must not be done at a rate that makes British agriculture uncompetitive and unprofitable. We want to move towards pillar two, but in a considered manner, and the profitability of agriculture must be borne in mind. I believe that the hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice), who spoke for the Conservatives, said that we should move away entirely from direct payments to management schemes. That is the first time that I have heard that suggested. He must mean that to be done at the end of 2013.

James Paice: I think that the phrase I used was a "phased programme" of transfer; that has been our approach to common agricultural policy reform for several years now. It is about shifting resources from pillar one to pillar two over a reasonable period, precisely for the reason that the hon. Gentleman describes—to give farmers time to adjust. That shift should happen across the whole of Europe.

Roger Williams: I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman has been able to clarify that point. He also talked about co-financing for nations that wanted to spend more on agriculture. I am not sure how that would work within a common agricultural policy. I understand the issue of co-financing within the CAP, but it seems to me that if one country wanted to spend more on a particular aspect, that would destroy the concept of a common agricultural policy.
	People should take responsibility for their own food security. That is a point that a number of people have taken up. When towns or developments are being planned, allotments and other land should be set aside so that people can get involved in food production. People not only want farmers' markets and other local food production, but want to produce food for themselves, and they should be given the opportunity to do so.
	I call on the Government to take action on the Competition Commission report on supermarkets. There is no doubt that there have been uncompetitive practices. Supermarkets are reaping the rewards of their actions; the fact that food prices have risen substantially is partly due to supermarkets having paid farmers so poorly that food production has been reduced. Representatives from supermarkets are now going around the country trying to find produce to fill their shelves. The Competition Commission recommended establishing an independent ombudsman for the supermarket and retail trade. I ask the Minister to say, when he replies to the debate, when the Government will act on that issue.
	My last point is that we should secure the hills. The hills are a huge jewel in the crown for the UK. The profitability of farming in the hills is decreasing so rapidly that no young people will take up the farms there in future. Unless the Government come forward with plans to address that problem, we will end up with dereliction in the hills, rather than the management that so many people want, so that they can enjoy their walks and their recreation in the hills.
	This has been a useful debate. It is one that the Secretary of State wanted, and all Members have engaged in it in a positive way.

Ian Gibson: I was inspired to contribute to the debate after a meeting held last week by Sir Ben Gill, who gathered together 100 brains from different parts of the United Kingdom to consider the issue. The problem with such debates is that 100 issues come flooding out into the ether, rather as they did in the last speech. The subject requires some concentrated focusing down on what the important issues are, in both the short and the long term.
	I want to thank two friends of mine, Professor Ian Crute from the Rothamsted research laboratory in Harpenden, and Professor Chris Lamb from the John Innes Centre and the Sainsbury laboratory in Norwich; the people there do sterling work on plant genetics and developing food crops. I shall say something more about them when I focus on the issue, but I start with the comments of the new chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington. At a GovNet sustainable development UK conference in Westminster, at which the Secretary of State spoke, Professor John Beddington said quite clearly:
	"There is progress on climate change. But out there is another major problem. It is very hard to imagine how we can see a world growing enough crops to produce renewable energy and at the same time meet the enormous increase in the demand for food which is quite properly going to happen as we alleviate poverty."
	That is a strong, political message from our new chief scientific adviser. I am sure that more will be said about that issue in the coming months.
	The year 2008 is distinguished by the fact that fewer members of the world population derive their livelihood in rural areas than in towns. More people buy food produced by others than are involved in its production. A few years ago, land workers in this country disappeared. In my part of the world—East Anglia—there were always strong Labour constituencies, because farm workers knew which way the cookie crumbled. It all changed when new factories were built and so on. We lost a lot of that technology and skill on the land.
	This year is the centenary of a discovery that has probably saved more lives than any other discovery in the history of mankind—the Haber-Bosch process of making ammonia from gaseous nitrogen and hydrogen, which was discovered in 1908. It provided the ability to manufacture nitrogen fertiliser, and it is estimated that without access to synthetic nitrogen fertilisers there would be half as many humans on the planet, or we would have had to cultivate double the land area. Either way, there would be major ecological destruction, conflict and suffering. Some people argue against that view, but whether one loves them or hates them, pesticides and insecticides have made an important contribution to farming development across the world. We feed 6.5 billion people from 1.5 billion hectares of land. The area of land used to grow grain globally—about 2 billion tonnes per annum—has hardly increased in the past 50 years, but crop productivity has kept ahead, as we have heard, of rapid population growth, which has been achieved through foresight and sustained investment in agricultural science and technology, from the period between the wars until 20 years or so ago, when we became rather complacent. That may cost us dear.
	With global grain stocks at an all-time low—less than 10 days' worth, it is estimated—and with ever-increasing demand from an urbanising Asian population; with the losses of arable land to degradation and urbanisation; and with the impact of climate change and the rising cost of oil, we can be sure that high food prices will be with us for some time to come. The only response is to increase the food supply. There are only two ways to increase food production: plough more land or increase the yield per hectare. I shall deal with the first proposal and discount it as a solution. The total land area of the earth is about 13 billion hectares, but more than a third is desert, high mountains or covered in ice, so it does not support the growth of crops. Of the remaining two thirds, we cultivate 1.5 billion hectares, which is only 18 per cent. of the land area of the planet, leaving more than 7 billion hectares, which support plant growth. However, we would be ill advised to use that land because it is stable pasture, forest and savannah, and harbours a vast supply of stored carbon. If we plough it or cut down forests, we release carbon into the atmosphere and reduce the earth's capacity to fix carbon. That is not a sensible thing to do, although we know that deforestation is taking place and that the pressure to bring more land into cultivation is indeed very great in some parts of the world, and there is a strong political pressure.
	If we are not going to plough more land, how are we going to achieve more productivity per hectare to meet global demand? Scientific knowledge comes into it, as does an understanding of plant genetics, soil science, plant pathology, and pest biology. In fact, we must harness our understanding of the components of agricultural ecosystems. Science will enable us to remove some of the things that constrain agricultural productivity, and we must invest in it quickly. Since the years of the previous Government, we have believed that as a wealthy nation we will always be able to buy what food we want on world markets and that affordable food will always be available. As a result of that complacency, we have under-invested and severely damaged what was, and still can be, a world-class capability in agricultural science. The point is that as food prices increase, it is the poorest of the world, and even the poor in rich nations like ours, who suffer. In Europe, and particularly the UK, we have fertile resilient soils, a favourable climate and excellent skills, so we have an obligation to the future to ensure that we obtain maximum productivity with minimum environmental disturbance from that natural resource.
	Let me return to the science. Five things constrain plant growth. Science and technology cannot deal with all of them, but it can address most of them. First, radiant energy for photosynthesis is all about latitude. We cannot do too much about that, but through molecular genetics it is possible to make photosynthesis more efficient and therefore fix more carbon for growth. The work at Rothamsted research laboratory in Harpenden introduces the prospect of higher crop yields by increasing the efficiency with which radiant energy is converted to chemical energy. The UK has a jewel there—the longest established agricultural research centre in the world, and a deep reservoir of knowledge and expertise which we must do more to foster and exploit.
	Another constraint is temperature, which is a feature of latitude and altitude. We can use modern glasshouse technology to conserve energy and prolong growing seasons but, more importantly, we must anticipate problems of extreme temperature, even here in the UK, where it could have catastrophic effects on cereal yields. Mathematical simulation and modelling from Rothamsted point to the need for emphasis to be placed on breeding crops with resilience to high temperatures, which are predicted to become more frequent.
	A further constraint is water. The only reason why we can grow food in some parts of the world, such as India, is that we move water from places where it is plentiful to places where it is scarce. We can use sophisticated technology to use water more efficiently, and 70 per cent. of fresh water on the planet is used for agriculture. The competition for water for urban, domestic, industrial and agricultural use is becoming more intense. It could, indeed, become the source of warfare and strife. Science can deliver to us crops that use water more efficiently—a really green and valuable application of the science of genetic engineering. That is the target of several research groups, and in particular, that which I have spoken about at the John Innes centre in Norwich.
	At the beginning of my contribution, I mentioned nitrogen fertiliser and its importance for cultivation. Adequate crop nutrition—sufficient provision of nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium and trace elements—is essential for high yields. We need crops that are nutrient-use efficient, and we need to use high technology to ensure that nutrients get to the right place at the right time to bring about their effects. Nitrogen fertilisers require fossil fuels for their synthesis and they can pollute watercourses; we must use them more efficiently. The world experts in that arena are also located in the UK, at Rothamsted. In Norwich, we have groups working on the prospect of transferring to other crop plants, such as wheat, the genetic capacity of legumes, which fix their own nitrogen through associated bacteria. We can transfer them across plants. We surely must resource better and encourage more important work, because it is vital to our future.
	The fifth constraint, and the source of much wasted water, energy, labour, nutrients and so forth, are pests, diseases and weeds. Some 25 per cent. of all crops are lost to those causes before or after harvest, and the control of pests, diseases and weeds would go a long way to providing the extra 50 per cent. of food that we will need between now and 2030, when the world's population will reach about 9 billion. How do we do that? In Norwich, at the Sainsbury laboratory at the John Innes centre, and at Rothamsted, pioneering work exploits natural plant defences and their genetic control, aided by green chemistry to deliver a new generation of pest-resistant and disease-resistant crops. The threat of resistance to pesticides, the agricultural equivalent of MRSA, is being countered and responded to at Rothamsted, with the application of new molecular diagnostic methods and management practices that will sustain the effective lifetime of those valuable chemicals.
	In conclusion, Members will realise from what I have said that the challenge is great, but we have the tools, technology and intellect to meet it, and we must nurture, encourage and resource the science. This is my message: we must sweep away any regulatory environment that impedes that progress and makes the lives of farmers who grow food more difficult. We ought to ensure that safe pesticides exist, and as the argument develops we ought seriously to consider genetically modified crops again. We all know the arguments in respect of GM crops, and I do not want to go through them now, because we will do so on many future occasions, but about 300 million Americans have consumed food derived from GM crops—without a single tort in the most litigious society in history. [ Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) laughs, and we could continue the argument until the cows come home.
	The use of Bt cotton in, for example, China benefits small-scale farmers. Other people will point to the monopolies of the various pharmaceutical companies—Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta and so on—and how they develop the technology. The argument is there. However, as the Minister said, we have to look seriously at GM as part of a key breeding tool in the context of a shift to science-based, targeted and predictive breeding underpinned by some kind of plant genetics.
	GM is not the whole process, but it is a part that we have to contemplate seriously and get back to. The arguments are not all about how the technology is used; they are also about how such crops are produced and what good they are. As was said in a debate on human embryology, when GM was used to produce insulin in human cells there was no argument whatever; the development was quite tolerable. However, when we try to make plants that are resistant to certain bugs and viruses, resistance seems to develop among certain parts of the community.
	The science-to-crop-improvement pipeline is fractured internationally and it requires significant capacity development in developing countries. Today we have read in the papers that not enough physicists are coming through; we also need more plant geneticists. We need people who want to work on plants and develop new, efficient crops that are resistant to drought and so on. We must get such people into our education system. Plants are not always popular; animal and medical techniques and technologies seem to take many of the best people. We have to keep hammering home the message that we need to produce more food and we need to use science to do it.

Michael Jack: I am delighted that my hon. Friend the Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice) managed to secure this important debate on the security of our food supply. The hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) said that we all ought to do something about the issue, so for the record I should say that Sunday afternoon saw me on my allotment harvesting my first courgettes, nurturing my peas and onions and battling against the overwhelming forces of the weeds.
	Doing a little horticulture made me reflect on the fact that at least I had at my disposal a range of sophisticated chemicals to deal with the creatures that—in spite of my most persuasive words to the snails and slugs that keep coming on to the allotment—want to take away the food that I am growing. I realised how fine the margins are between having and not having a food supply. The hon. Member for Norwich, North rightly reminded us of the enormous progress made by science and technology, as far as western agriculture is concerned, in increasing the margin between having and not having a crop.
	Before I became a Member of Parliament, I worked in the horticulture industry. I remember standing in a field of leeks that had been hit by a severe cold spell. They had effectively melted. No amount of science was going to stop the loss of that crop. It is important that we recognise that all our discussions on the availability of food are surrounded by natural forces over which we—mankind on this planet—have very little influence. Yes, we can do something to address the vagaries of climate change, but the limits are there for all to see.
	I had the privilege and pleasure of going to the world food summit in Rome on behalf of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee. I sat through the presentations of all the Heads of State there, and that gave me an interesting perspective into the whole question. In the west, we have effectively subcontracted our supply of food to supermarkets and major caterers; 80 per cent. of the food spend in this country happens in supermarkets. The idea that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has some command-economy role to play in respect of the price of food or its supply is not credible. However, the Department can influence some of the key policy instruments that can ultimately affect the purchasing policies of companies such as Sainsbury's, Tesco and Marks & Spencer. We have subcontracted our food supply to them; they make the procurement decisions.
	It is important to distinguish between the factors that have led to a short-term rapid rise in the price of food and consider them against the background of the period five or 10 years ago when my hon. Friend the Member for South-East Cambridgeshire would have talked about falling real rates of return to producers and the impact that they were having on the structure of the United Kingdom's agriculture. Those falling real rates of return were a contributory factor in the restructuring of the dairy and horticulture industries, and in pig producers going out of business and so on. They are also one reason why people in the arable sector have looked, enviously in the first instance and now with enthusiasm, at biofuels, which represented an opportunity to use set-aside land productively to produce something rather than nothing.
	From the western point of view, we have to look at the relationship between the overall policy framework, namely the common agricultural policy, and its effect on the supply side of the equation. The world food summit taught me that there is another view of agriculture, and the Secretary of State alluded to it when he talked about Africa. When one listens to the Heads of State from the less developed parts of the world, it is clear they take a very different view. Those countries have very small-scale micro-agriculture. There are some medium-sized and large-scale producers, but nothing compared with the very large-scale agriculture in the United States and some parts of western Europe. Their challenges are the affordability of seed and simple fertiliser, the availability of water, and the opportunity to get their food to market—all the things that the Secretary of State mentioned. It is a question of how we in the west can stimulate production in those countries and address the fundamental issue of the supply of food for their indigenous people. At the same time, that will take some of the pressure off the west having to make up for the fact that, in the less developed countries, the margin between feast and famine is wafer thin.
	It is interesting to look at the statistics showing the priority that we in the world give to agriculture. In the past 12 months, we put $1 trillion into propping up the world's financial system and $4 billion into aid for food production. It is also interesting that it costs the world $20 billion annually to deal with the consequences of obesity. Perhaps if we ate a little less, there would be a little more for others.
	There are so many ways of looking at this multi-faceted subject that it is difficult to come to a neat five or six-point conclusion on what we need to do. I am firmly of the view that it is vital to knit together the many and various world bodies and policy-setting forums. The World Trade Organisation has been talking about market liberalisation and opening up opportunities. That is right, because the returns that farmers receive fundamentally change the supply-side equation. If one wants more from farmers, give them the return and within 12 months they will react to it.
	However, there are downsides to reform. For example, the change in the sugar regime under the common agricultural policy resulted in the price of sugar within the European Union falling, which brought forth immediate criticism from Afro-Caribbean producers who said, "We can't supply sugar at that price—it's not high enough for us." We can open the door to market access, but the price consequences can have the wrong effect, and unless one can help those countries to modernise their agriculture, we will lose an important resource. It is vital to link together the work of the European Union, the WTO, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations and the Food and Agriculture Organisation, and then to make certain that the grand plans that they talk about really happen. At the world food summit, the President of Senegal got up and said, "Look, we've been at this for 10 years. We've heard all this before. Just give me the budget of the FAO and I'll go and sort out the world's food supply." He was saying that we had had too much talk and not enough action.
	One of the themes that came out of the conference was that, because there had been a green revolution, people thought that agriculture had started to motor forward in the less developed world and the development agenda had moved on to health and education. Then, all of a sudden, we found that agricultural production had been falling, just when the world's population was increasing and climate change was threatening some of the major centres of world agricultural production, such as Australia. If we bring the two together, we get a shortage of supply, rising demand and rising prices. Therefore, optimising the opportunities to use our agricultural knowledge to address those issues is one of the most important things that we can do.
	I have one or two other points of contrast. President Lula da Silva of Brazil made a passionate defence of his country's production of biofuels. He pointed out that Brazil has 340 million hectares of agricultural land, 200 million hectares of which is pasture, with 63 million devoted to crops and only seven million used to grow sugar cane. He pointed out that 77 million hectares of land could be brought into production in one of the most interesting areas in the world for agricultural production and he said that that could be done without destroying the rain forest. I have to take what he said at face value, but against the background of rising arable crop prices, the demand for biofuels and the important issues of sustainability raised in western circles, I asked myself why those 77 million hectares were not being used for production. Constraints exist, some of which are agronomic, but some are influenced by market access.
	That brings us full circle to the European Union's policy on subsidies versus exports, and its attitudes to the World Trade Organisation talks. There are interesting lessons to be learned from some of the speeches at the conference, and for me, the cameo speech was that of the President of the Republic of Madagascar. He did not stand up and say, "I want lots of aid", but said that there were certain things that his country could do for itself. His first point was that
	"industrialized countries subsidize the export of these products"—
	the things that his country produced. He wants a level playing field with regard to the economics of world agricultural production. He went on to make a number of points, but the next one that caught my eye was that
	"no-one really cared about farmers, their legal situation, their security, their ability to access credit".
	Simple things can give a sense of security to the local farmer, such as the provision of resources and credit, which is where the World Bank can make such an enormous difference.
	The President talked about the initiative going on in Madagascar—a new vision that he called "Madagascar naturally". He went on to talk about the liberalisation of the price of rice in that economy, which had led to a 25 to 30 per cent. increase in production in the past three years. That shows the simple relationship between return and an increase in production. He also said that
	"we need better training and better advice...we have to increase our productivity per hectare by using better seeds."
	He did not want to become dependent on western nations, but wanted to improve his storage and transport facilities. He wanted to standardise and improve his product; he wanted to develop new products that would meet international demand; and he wanted better marketing strategies. Against that background, he said that his country also produced some of its own biofuels.
	While I was sitting there listening to all that, and we were discussing the food chain, climate change, agricultural science, environmental issues, the role of aquiculture and the challenge of pests and diseases, I kept saying to myself, "Where's DEFRA?" It was not represented. There was no DEFRA Minister and no DEFRA civil servant. The UK representation was left to the Department for International Development. I am sure that it did a very good job of putting forward the UK's position, but given that DEFRA has the prime responsibility for food, it has the levers to mobilise our food chain by disseminating information and using technology. It has learned many of the lessons that are so vital in other parts of the world, it leads on climate change and, as the hon. Member for Norwich, North has pointed out, it holds the levers on agricultural science.
	The John Innes Centre has a budget from public funds of £12.5 million and earns another £12.5 million from contracts. That makes £25 million, which would hardly buy a really good premiership forward. We have to address the priority that we give to the science and technology issues that are vital not only to our agriculture but to that of less developed countries. I would like the Secretary of State's Department to become fully engaged in providing what the President of Madagascar said would be a key ingredient in improving the performance of his agricultural sector. For Madagascar, read many other enlightened countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.
	It comes down to this: we must consider the factor that has caused us to consider this matter now—the rising price of food—but at the same time, we must minimise the risk to the world's food supply chain. We must use our technology and knowledge not only to increase total food productivity from our excellent indigenous agriculture but to maximise the potential of Africa, the east of Russia and other parts of the world, such as Brazil, that have tremendous potential. Then we might rest a little easier in our beds about the world having a secure supply of food.

Several hon. Members: rose —

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. Before I call the next speaker, may I say to the House that we have probably a little under half an hour to go? Three Members are seeking to catch my eye, and if each can manage to restrict his remarks to a little under 10 minutes, we might fit everybody in.

David Drew: I shall take careful note of your remarks, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and be as brief as I possibly can, particularly as I rehearsed my arguments in the debate that we had on 3 June, as my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs knows. I shall make my speech and he can make his, and we can reconsider food security.
	I wish to address some matters that are different from those that I raised that day, at the time of the Rome conference. I am delighted to follow the comments of the right hon. Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack), the Chairman of the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, on the conference. I shall park the matter there, but it was an important conference and it is good to hear for the first time the contents of some of the speeches.
	I wish to address some of the major themes and discuss some slightly different issues. It is a pity that my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) is no longer in his place, because he does the science bit and I do the anti-science bit. Long may that continue—we are very good friends, but we do not agree about everything. I wish to say a few things about genetically modified crops, as people would suspect.
	I shall begin with a couple of points that are more general. As I said in the debate on 3 June, I never felt that the era of low food prices would last for ever. I also felt that low food prices sometimes have counter-productive effects. We have abused food and used it in ways that we should not, and it has been taken for granted. As the most basic of all God's supplies, we have taken far too liberal a view of food and of how to face up to future challenges. I would argue that at least we can now debate the matter—I suspect that, a year ago, we would not have held such a debate. Perhaps the Government took food security for granted, and there was a general context in which it was believed that food would remain cheap, that that was a good thing and that we would never have to debate the matter. However, that is clearly not the case and we are having the debate, which concentrates the mind.
	The reasons for being where we are have been well rehearsed. As no one else has done so, let me give a plug to the Cabinet Office paper, which the Select Committee examined. It remains a good analysis of the different criteria whereby our food is produced, who can buy it, the international consequences and the impact on health. The latter has not been mentioned, but it is important and we ignore it at our peril.
	We talk about food security as a global or a national issue, but it is sometimes highly personal. I shall say a little about the impact of rising food prices on the poor, which should concern us, shortly. There is a live debate about what we should do with the school meals service. The School Food Trust now says that it can do nothing with the money that it has set aside to provide school meals, and that, despite Jamie Oliver, there has been a decline in the take up of school meals. That has a huge impact in two respects. First, it means that some children will have inferior food and, more particularly, if we cannot educate children appropriately at school about good food and catering, there is little chance, given the way society has gone, that they will have that education.
	I am grateful to July's edition of  Green Futures, which states that Washington state has decided to put $600,000 into locally grown food and vegetable snacks for the school meals service there. The Americans had no hesitation—partly because they support their agricultural system in that way, but also because, when they have a problem, such as rising food prices, they put resources into it—in subsidising those who most need it. Such initiatives, which are perceived as "nanny state" if this country introduces them, are part and parcel of the operation of American states. We should take more such action.
	Let us consider the impact of rising food prices on the poorest. Again, the Americans have had food stamps for generations. If we consider the link between production and support for the producers, we might like also to examine the impact on those who buy food. The impact of rising food prices in the past few weeks and months has been greatest on those who buy. I do not suggest food stamps per se, but one of the advantages of a deficiency payment system was that we provided food to those who could least afford to buy it. The whole EU has moved away from that to a minimum price system, and that has an effect. Those who cannot afford to buy food of quality and variety are adversely affected. It is therefore a great shame that we do not consider a more flexible system. As a long-standing opponent of the EU, I wish we had more national control because there can be reasons for intervening. For example, I have considered the school meals service, supporting the poorest through flexibility in providing food, and the price at which the food is being made available.
	To some extent, we are still debating the last war, although things have moved on. As the hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice) said, there are new opportunities for production and new people are going into production. People are growing more in their gardens and trying to get allotments. Community agriculture means that people are genuinely coming together—there are two examples in Stroud, as hon. Members can imagine. People are making the best use of their time and are willing to consider how they can produce food. That is at least interesting, and we need to encourage it and see it as a different way of really localising the food chain. Again, I stress that we must see food security not as a global or national issue, but as a local one.
	It was interesting to hear some of the things that Sir Iain Anderson said about biosecurity and biosafety in a private meeting last week. I have felt for a long time that the biggest threat to this country is animal disease, whether imported or created indigenously—we all know about the impact of that. I have never been sure what we would do if a series of animal diseases all hit at the same time. I did not receive a terribly satisfactory answer to my question a week or so ago, but I continue to bang on about how important it is to look at the strategy, because I do not think that we will get animal diseases in single order anymore. Rather, it is quite possible that we will have a number of them all together. We need to have the means to bear down on them, otherwise our whole food chain will suffer.
	But on to GM. I heard what my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said about the issue being safety and the environment. I also heard what my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North said about how we must continue to experiment. I would introduce a third factor, which has always worried me, which is this: who owns the means to propagate GM? My greatest concern has always been about the concentration of our retailers and supermarkets—we are increasingly seeing this with the globalisation of the control of seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and the rest of it. Until we can break those monopolies, I will always be fearful. That is my fundamental opposition to GM. It is interesting that people have recently begun to look into both the entry costs and the exit costs of GM. There is always the terminator gene, too. I know that it can be greatly exaggerated, but it is nevertheless something that we must face up to.
	In conclusion, I am not nearly as sanguine about GM. I do not see it as the answer. More particularly, the worrying thing is that GM is moving in the direction of increasing concentrations of power and the ability to influence the food chain in a completely different way from how I would like it to develop. My way would be to encourage localisation, encourage more people to do things for themselves, and recognise that there are farmers' markets and ways for communities to come together and effect changes in what we now call food fundamentals. Again, those things are happening out there, but it is a great shame that we in this place do not look at those local initiatives and see them as important to the huge strategic issues that we face regularly. As long as that is heard and understood and as long as there is some recognition that this issue is as important as some of those other debates, I will be quiet and let others continue the debate.

Richard Benyon: In the few minutes left, I will try to add something new to this debate.
	I always think that food security needs to be considered in the context of the fragility of our food supply. That was brought home to us recently by the fuel strike, during which we saw photographs—they may have been in the  Daily Mail, but they were there nevertheless—of empty shelves. If I want to scare myself as I cross the M25 coming into London, I think for a moment about how many eggs, pints of milk, loaves of bread, bags of peas or tonnes of fish have to cross that line just to feed this city on a daily basis. The way in which that is achieved daily is a triumph of market forces. I try to imagine how it would happen if it was controlled by a central agency—by DEFRA, perhaps. I suspect that there might be a few people fed in the suburbs, but food riots in Chelsea. We have to learn from the successes of the free market in order to make ourselves more self-sufficient.
	That is why I support the idea of places such as Thanet Earth. I have not been there, and there might be all sorts of problems locally that I have not heard about, but I have always believed that there was a market for proper, large-scale, home-grown food production near to centres of population. I have never subscribed to the belief that low wage costs elsewhere in the world would drive food production inexorably away from these shores. I have seen at first hand how food is produced highly efficiently in places such as Kenya. However, given the wage inflation in the developing world—it stood at 43 per cent. in parts of China last year—I believe that there is a huge market for places such as Thanet Earth. Furthermore, I never believed the GM theory that was propounded a few years ago—that we could feed the world from a farm the size of Delaware. There is a great future for British agriculture.
	I am amazed that the Government's proposed amendment to our motion says that
	"UK self sufficiency stands at 74 per cent. for food which can be grown in the UK, which is higher than in the early 1950s".
	It is worth putting that statement into context. When Winston Churchill spoke at a National Farmers Union dinner in the 1950s, he said:
	"30 million people, all living on an island where we produce enough food for say 15 million, is a spectacle of majesty and insecurity this country can ill afford".
	I wonder what heights of hyperbole he might reach if he were able to consider the situation today, with double the population and the declining level of food self-sufficiency.
	Given the global changes in demand, our own consumer needs and the effects of the rise in the price of oil, we are faced with either a serious problem or a great opportunity. Huge challenges face our agricultural community, but there are also opportunities, and we need to embrace them. Unfortunately, at present, there appears to be a widespread lack of understanding of the fundamental importance of agriculture in this country. This sometimes leaves farmers with a sense that they are redundant, undervalued and misunderstood. I think that I am the only dairy farmer in the House—my hon. Friend the Member for Leominster (Bill Wiggin) will correct me if I am wrong—but I will not be one for much longer. I am selling my herd this autumn. Regulations relating to nitrate vulnerable zones and the cost of complying with an overburdening regulation scheme are driving me out of milk production. I should have reminded hon. Members to look at my declaration in the Register of Members' Interests.
	Farmers are the main users of land in Great Britain. Farming is a significant economic sector, but it is easy to forget the contribution that it makes to other income earners in this country, including tourism. The present Government have failed to give confidence to the agricultural community as a whole. We have seen their incompetence over the single farm payments and the needless red tape, gold-plating and bureaucracy that have been imposed on farmers and landowners. I remember my father talking about the agricultural community's fear of Labour party manifestos which talked, year after year, about the nationalisation of land. It is wonderful that that is no longer in Labour manifestos; it has not been in them for years. I submit, however, that there has been a nationalisation of the use of the land. What we can actually do on our farms is now so restricted, and the quangocracy now controls so tightly what farmers can do, that we no longer have the freedom that we had in the past.
	In conclusion, I want to make a plea, and I use these words with great caution. I believe that there needs to be a reassessment of the power of the environmental and conservation lobby. Actually, I call it the conservation industry. I am part of it; I have chaired a conservation organisation and I am a member of a variety of conservation bodies. I consider myself a conservationist. I have won conservation awards, for what that is worth. The problems of the 1970s, which included hedges being taken out to produce more food, represented appalling excesses. I can remember being encouraged to use appalling pesticides, such as Hostathion, which killed everything and had a wide impact on our environment. However, since the 1970s, the pendulum has swung much too far the other way.
	I heard recently about a prime management objective on an agreed management policy of a farm in Scotland, which was
	"to create, maintain and encourage a high density of breeding raptors".
	I have nothing against raptors; in fact, I am very fond of them and take great delight in the red kites on my farm. I would, however, question whether we have the balance right. In an era of food shortage, is it morally right to have such a—dare I say it—smug first-world attitude in saying that farms in this country should no longer have the prime objective of producing food? I submit that we can produce food and maintain the environment. The moral issues were clearly put by my hon. Friend the Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice): when we cannot grow something here, we have to buy it on the world market, and when we buy it on the world market, we are competing with poorer countries. That is something that we should ponder—whether we are getting the balance right.
	I wanted to say much more, but I also want to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski), the eminent chairman of the all-party dairy farmers group.

Daniel Kawczynski: I read the motion as focusing on our own food security here in the UK, although many others have spoken about problems in other parts of the world. I view the motion as relevant to our own country, and the Secretary of State has tried to pour a soothing balm over the whole crisis that we face. He tried to appear both very positive and as the friend of the farmers, but I have to tell him—I want to take this opportunity to explain it to the House—that this country faces a crisis in its agricultural sector. He knows how passionately I feel about dairy farming, and speaking as chairman of the all-party dairy farmers group, I have to tell him and the House that more than 170 MPs across the parties are involved in the group and they all feel passionately about the future of our dairy sector.
	In 1997, 47 cattle were slaughtered in Shropshire. Last year, the figure had risen to more than 1,200. I keep repeating those figures: how can we go from 47 cattle slaughtered in one year to more than 1,200? To me, that seems just phenomenal. It goes over and over in my mind, and it reflects the state of the crisis that we have with bovine TB in Shropshire. This year, if current trends continue, more than 1,600 cattle will be slaughtered in Shropshire.
	As the House knows, I like talking about Shropshire, but nationally, as my hon. Friend the Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice) stated—the National Farmers Union confirmed these figures to me today—28,000 cattle were slaughtered in 2007 and it is likely that 40,500 will be slaughtered in 2008. That is going to cost the British taxpayer more than £100 million in compensation to the affected farmers—money that I believe the Government can ill afford in current circumstances.
	One farmer in my constituency is Mr. Chris Balmer—I want that name to be indelibly etched in the mind of the Secretary of State—from the village of Snailbeach. He had bovine TB on his farm and I had to intervene on 16 occasions concerning the fiasco over his rural payments during the last year. This is a man who has been literally brought to his knees by the incompetence of DEFRA in respect of tackling bovine TB and getting the payments to him. If I could ask one thing of the Secretary of State, it would be to please ensure that that one constituent is treated in a much better way in future. If the right hon. Gentleman is interested to know more about the serious problems that my constituent has faced, I would be happy to talk to him about them.
	It does not have to be like this. France has eradicated bovine TB. Less than 0.004 per cent. of herds in France are infected— [Interruption.] I hear some socialist MP saying no, that is wrong. Well, I have spent hours translating Ministry of Agriculture statements from France where those involved are lauding their achievements in this sphere. France has tackled bovine TB through a huge investment in extra testing, vaccines and a limited cull of badgers. If the French can do it, why can the Government not do it? They will not do it because, in their growing unpopularity, they are desperately worried about those marginal seats where there are many members of the Wildlife Trusts.
	The Government do not want to offend members of the Wildlife Trusts. I understand that. There are 5,000 Shropshire Wildlife Trust members and it is the biggest organisation in my county. So concerned are those people about my desire for a limited cull of badgers that they insisted that on Friday night my wife and I spend four hours watching a badger sett and looking at all the badgers. They even gave my baby daughter Alexis a little cuddly badger to play with. They desperately want us to stop talking about badgers and a potential limited cull, but my priority has to be my Shropshire farmers, although I think badgers are sweet. I have seen all the evidence that there is a definite link between badgers and the spread of bovine TB.
	I must also tell the Secretary of State that I entirely agreed with my hon. Friend the Member for South-East Cambridgeshire when he raised the issue of illegal meat imports and said that 12,000 tonnes of illegal meat come through our ports. Why is that being tolerated? We need extra security guards in our ports to deal with that illegal meat. Australia and New Zealand have specific border guards who deal with the problem to ensure that illegal meat and substances are not trafficked. Will the Secretary of State give me an assurance that some investment will be made to ensure that there are more officers and sniffer dogs at our ports to try to deal with the huge increase in illegal meat imports?
	Food security starts with encouraging people to grow their own vegetables. That may be a funny thing to say, but one Briton in three is thinking of starting up an allotment and growing their own vegetables. I have 16 raised beds at home and I grow all my own vegetables for my family, as well as having planted an orchard. I take great pride in looking after my orchard, and nothing gives me more pleasure than looking after my fruit trees and vegetables and providing my family with organic foods grown locally.
	The Government should do more to encourage councils to have more allotments. Today, I went to Greenfields, which is part of Shrewsbury, and spoke to the gentleman who runs the Greenfields allotments. There is a huge waiting list of people trying to get allotments and we should do more to encourage councils to give people the chance to grow their own food.
	I am conscious of the time, so I shall end my remarks. I have spoken in private with the Secretary of State on this issue, and today I spoke with the National Farmers Union. We all await the Government's decision on bovine TB, which is one of the worst things affecting my constituency. I hope to hear from the Secretary of State some assurances that the Government will finally tackle the disease and save many Shropshire farmers from going out of business.

Bill Wiggin: The Secretary of State has said that the
	"poorest can't get enough food".
	He is right, but failing in the UK makes that problem worse in the rest of the world. He moved from the previous DEFRA position, and we welcome that U-turn. He is a nice chap; he waves his arms around in an inclusive way and I have a soft spot for people with political parents, but he is wrong about food security being an unknown in the future. He never offered solutions on animal health and welfare, deregulation, gold-plating or, worst of all, public procurement, so without leadership on the issue food security will be a problem in the future.
	The hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Mr. Williams) is a member of the Select Committee, but he failed to mention TB. Perhaps he should go away and read the Committee's report. He did mention our own farmers with pride. In this year, the 100th anniversary of the National Farmers Union, I can completely agree with him that we owe farmers a great debt of gratitude and we should be extremely proud of the industry.
	The hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) made a very interesting scientific speech, which I enjoyed—he spoke of such matters as the invention of fertiliser—but it might have come across better as a PowerPoint presentation. It was very technical.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack) talked about his allotment. I cannot resist pulling his leg: I know he is an expert on all agricultural matters, but he did tell the House that he was talking to his slugs and snails, which made me chuckle. He also talked about the horticulture industry and melting leeks, the limits of climate change, and—most important—the world food summit. I listened carefully and with enjoyment to what he said about the President of Madagascar's speech, about the fact that we talk about improving agriculture but do not actually do it, about the way in which countries can help themselves if they are allowed to, and, of course, about the endless demand for a level playing field. I know that my constituents will be sad to learn that DEFRA was not represented at the conference, as I think they would rather it was abroad than at home.
	The hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) described himself as the anti-science Member, which worried me somewhat. He also told us that we had abused food—I was not sure what he meant—and talked about things being "in the round", from which I assume that he had eaten what he should not have eaten. He talked about school food and nutritional education, which I agree is an important subject—as is Washington state's support for local production. I believe that if we address ourselves to local procurement, we can make a huge impact and send out all the right signals. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the present position is a disgrace.
	The speech that I considered most powerful was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Mr. Benyon), who knew exactly what he was talking about. He spoke of opportunity, understanding agriculture and the undervaluation of the dairy farmer. I think we all agree with that. He talked with great sadness of how he was being driven out of dairy farming by the nitrate vulnerable zone regulations, and I too thought that that was deeply sad. He also talked about the single farm payment, the nationalisation of the use of land and, of course, his own award-winning role as a conservationist. It was an extremely helpful and powerful speech, and it was sad that my hon. Friend could not continue for longer. It was really good to hear about an experience of that kind. I hoped that what he said about raptor breeding in Scotland related to golden eagles, but I suspect that it involved a lesser species.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) talked of the crisis in agriculture, and mentioned his constituent Chris Balmer. No one should miss the chance to emphasise the importance of what our constituents are suffering as a result of TB and rural payments. My hon. Friend spoke passionately about the dairy farming sector, of which he is a strong advocate, and about the number of cows being culled because they have TB.
	I do not think anyone has been left in any doubt that global food supplies and prices matter, because we live in an uncertain world in which global demand for food is rising and supplies are under pressure. The cost of the basics—wheat, rice and other cereals—is rising, and the increasing cost of fertiliser, energy and fuel is making food more expensive to produce and buy. Consumers are facing record food prices, while farmers and food producers are being squeezed because the increasing food production overheads are forcing up the costs of bringing food from farm to fork. We can no longer take it for granted that plenty of food will be available at low prices. In the last year alone, prices paid by consumers for food have risen dramatically. Butter and eggs are up by more than a third, bread by more than a quarter, flour by more than one fifth, and milk and cheese by one sixth.
	Regulation has placed an enormous burden on our farmers, costing the industry £500 million a year. The Government have already cost the industry more than £20 million in lost interest alone, and face a potential £300 million fine from the EU for failing to deliver the single farm payment on time. They believe that if British consumers have access to food, the food security issue is resolved, but at this time our country cannot continue to rely on an increasing supply of food imports. There are steps that the Government should be taking to improve domestic food production.
	Food procurement is the key. The Government have tremendous resources at their disposal to back British production through the £2 billion budget for public procurement, but with just 5 per cent. of British fruit being served in the NHS and our armed forces being fed with lamb that is just 13 per cent. British, it is clear that the public sector could do more to support local food production, or at least take steps towards a system whereby food that is publicly procured is produced to standards that are acceptable in Britain so that our producers can compete.
	Red tape is another crucial issue, and the Government fail to understand it. They must end gold-plating, and they can start by listening to farmers telling them about the impacts of the nitrates directive, which will cost farmers on average about £11,000 each, as well as the shift from risk to hazard-based pesticides, which will have a disproportionate effect on yields, and welfare standards and labelling.
	Happily, British consumers want to buy British, as they recognise the higher welfare standards to which our livestock is produced. The public demand those standards and our farmers deliver them, but meat cheaply imported and then sold as British—sometimes labelled as British because it is processed here—is all too often produced in conditions that fall well below the standards we would find legally and morally acceptable. This greatly disadvantages our own domestic food producers, and to counteract that the Government should be pressing the EU and the WTO to raise standards around the world. Then British producers could out-compete as standards rise, rather than see animal welfare dragged down by price to the lowest common denominator. The Government should also establish a better and more honest system of food labelling.

Robert Key: On food labelling, is my hon. Friend aware of another fabrication being perpetrated on the British consumer: the fact that smoked food does not have to be smoked? Most smoked bacon is dipped in chemicals and has never been near a whiff of smoke. Is that not astonishing?

Bill Wiggin: My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and it is a shame because we all try to support British food when we go shopping, but if we do not have honesty in labelling, how can we possibly direct our purchasing power in the right direction?
	When the Government launched their consultation on cost sharing for animal diseases, the Secretary of State remarked:
	"I want the industry to be much more deeply involved in the key policy and operational decisions, and rather than shy away from hard choices I think now is an opportune moment to reinvigorate this debate."
	If anyone is shying away from hard choices on disease control, it is this Government. They have dithered and failed to take the tough decisions on tackling TB so that we can have healthy cattle as well as healthy wildlife.
	From an animal welfare point of view alone, I cannot see how the Government can justify the suffering caused by leaving sick badgers to crawl around, excluded from their own social groups, fighting and possibly infecting other social groups of badgers through scratches, and then slowly dying, riddled with lesions that start in the bladder. That is inhumane, and we need to face up to our responsibilities to tackle this infection in order to protect our healthy badger population. Of course we should be acting responsibly towards our wild animals, but the taxpayers are footing a £100 million bill each year for culling infected cattle, and this bill looks set to rise inexorably higher. This situation cannot continue.
	Much of our debate has focused on land-based food production, but the incompetent way the Government regulate food production extends beyond the land we farm and into our fisheries, which we must manage sustainably. Like our farmers, our brave fishermen are under tremendous financial pressure. They have fuel costs, which have doubled over the past year, and while fishermen in Spain are receiving de minimis aid from the Government, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is in no position to support our fishing industry. The industry should be having access to £97 million of the European fisheries fund that we are entitled to, but because the Government failed to agree with the devolved Administrations how the money should be spent and failed to submit their operational programme to the European Commission by last year, and are in the middle of consulting the industry on it—something they should have been doing this time last year—this money will not be available until later this year, and some of it might even be withheld.
	Moreover, because the Government have not produced a policy to tackle fish discards, edible fish that could be sold to British consumers is being thrown back into the sea dead, and this precious food resource is wasted with no value to anyone. Food security—along with energy security, climate change and terrorism—is one of the major challenges of the 21st century. It matters to the public, to food producers on land and sea, and to our economy. To deliver it, we need competitive, viable and sustainable British food production fit for the 21st century. We also need a Government who have the political will to take the steps to help our food producers and free them to feed the nation.
	At the next general election, the public will have a choice between a Conservative party that truly values British food producers and consumers, or more years of misery, dithering and ruin under Labour.

Jonathan R Shaw: This has been a good and welcome debate. We welcome the remarks from the hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice) and the way he set out the key issues facing not just this nation but the world, in terms of how we tackle a rising population and the demands on our food.
	Many Members made important contributions, and particular reference was made to the European Union. Members from all parts of the House frequently say, "Why aren't we doing this in Europe? Why aren't we doing that? What about nitrates, pesticides, electronic identification? Why aren't you telling the other member states what to do?" Grandstanding is all very well, but Members really know that what we have to do is to make hard, solid arguments. On looking at the direction of travel of common agricultural policy reform, we see that many member states do not agree with us. They take a more protectionist line, and it is we who are in the vanguard of CAP reform. It is the UK Government who are shifting the subsidy for food production to public goods, so we are working hard on that issue and making good progress.
	Many Members made important contributions on what farmers and the farming community have done for our environment, and rightly so. This year is the 21st year of agri-environment schemes, which have been enormously successful. Many Members will doubtless have seen very imaginative schemes on farms in their own constituencies. The hon. Member for Salisbury (Robert Key) referred in an intervention to pesticides. I visited a farm recently where the farmer had a stewardship scheme. He had put in a border that was encouraging ladybirds. Of course, the ladybirds eat the aphids, so he was spending less money on fertilizer and pesticides. Such simple measures have led to enormous achievements, so we congratulate the farming community on its contribution in that regard.
	Several Members mentioned supermarkets, and the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry) referred to the discussion between supermarkets and the Competition Commission. He criticised the fact that, when supermarkets had tried to increase the amount of money that they paid to farms for good reasons, they were fined by the Competition Commission. My noble Friend Lord Rooker wants a dialogue, and we should surely be able to have a mature dialogue involving producers, the Government and the supermarkets that does not breach competition rules. That is a sensible idea and I know that he is taking it forward.
	Many Members talked about the World Trade Organisation, and we welcomed what the hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire said in that regard. He said that he agrees with us on protectionism, which we, too, do not want to see. Now is the time that we need to take forward the WTO, not least because a deal could be worth an estimated €120 billion to the global economy annually. That is €30 billion for the EU economy alone. We need to reform the agricultural policy, which undermines the ability of poorer countries to produce and trade agricultural goods and keeps prices high for EU consumers. Further CAP reform would reduce the prices that UK consumers pay for food. In 2007, the cost of the CAP to consumers was €33.4 billion.
	The hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Mr. Williams) referred to the single farm payment. We are making good progress on that, and it is the right policy because it is area-based and allows farmers to respond to the market. He is right to say that the EU is an important player in global food production. As the hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire said, we too have that responsibility. We will continue to be a contributor to the world, and we will of course support Africa and develop its agricultural industry, as mentioned by the right hon. Member for Flyde in a thought-provoking speech—[ Interruption.] I mean the right hon. Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack). I was thinking about his reference to snails and wondering whether he meant the members of the Select Committee, but I am sure that he would not be so rude. He made the important point that there has not been enough focus on agriculture in Africa, and the World Bank is now concentrating on that in a more effective way.
	The hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire mentioned the men and women who work in agriculture. One group that has not been mentioned in this debate is migrant labour. We introduced the Gangmasters Licensing Authority, and hon. Members will remember the cockle pickers in Morecambe. It was right to introduce legislation on that issue and we pay tribute to Paul Whitehouse and the work that he has done in collaboration with the trade unions and supermarkets. That has made a real difference to ensuring that we have floors of decency in the sector, in our packing sheds and fields. Migrant labour makes an important contribution without which this country would not be so strong in food production. We should point that out whenever possible. That is what farmers tell us, and it is an important point.
	Hon. Members mentioned biofuels, and we anticipate the Gallagher report. The hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire appears to have read it already, as he gave us a sneak preview. He obviously has good sources. We will bring that report forward shortly, and we need to tackle the issue of first and secondary biofuels.
	Hon. Members also mentioned waste. We throw away some £10 billion-worth of food a year—6 million tonnes—while 6 million children die of malnutrition.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) made an important contribution, focusing on the work of scientists. He told us how fertiliser was invented in 1908 and what a huge contribution it has made to the yield we can get from our land. He also talked about how we need more research on, for example, how we use water and chemicals in the farming industry.

Ian Taylor: Will the Minister accept a compliment on the trials of genetically modified food, which—if the trials work—will be an essential component of food security?

Jonathan R Shaw: My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State recently gave the go-ahead to a trial involving potatoes, but sadly they were vandalised—[ Interruption.] They were mashed, someone suggests.
	We live in a world of contradictions, in that we have some of the finest food we have ever produced—as hon. Members who have visited agricultural shows will have seen—but we are also producing some of the worst. It is important for supermarkets to be conscious of the primary producer. Asda is producing sausages, which it cannot even call pork sausages, for 16p and it should consider its responsibilities.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) talked about educating children about food. I pay tribute to the year of food and farming which has made a huge contribution by bringing thousands of children on to farms so that they understand that food is not produced neatly wrapped in cellophane by supermarkets, but grown and reared on our farms.
	The hon. Member for Leominster (Bill Wiggin) referred to animal diseases, and we are grateful for the partnership arrangement for bluetongue. Hon. Members referred to TB. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will make a decision on that—[Hon. Members: "When?"] Very soon. The hon. Member for Newbury (Mr. Benyon) referred to his experience as a dairy farmer and to Thanet Earth. Food security—

Andrew Robathan: rose in his place and claimed to move, That the Question be now put.
	 Question, That the Question be now put,  put and agreed to.

Question put accordingly, That the original words stand part of the Question:—
	 The House divided: Ayes 185, Noes 278.

Question accordingly negatived.
	 Question, That the proposed words be there added,  put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 31 (Questions on amendments), and agreed to.
	Mr Speaker  forthwith declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	That this House notes with concern current food shortages which are believed to have pushed 100 million people into hunger worldwide; acknowledges the steps taken by the Prime Minister to encourage coordinated international action to address global food security; welcomes the additional UK contribution to the World Food Programme; recognises that rising food prices as a result of global pressures are affecting household food budgets; believes that with rising global demand Great Britain needs a strong farming industry able to produce a significant proportion of UK food; notes that UK self sufficiency stands at 74 per cent. for food which can be grown in the UK, which is higher than in the early 1950s; and commends the Government's role in helping to develop a domestic farming sector that produces what consumers want in a way that preserves natural resources and enhances the valuable environmental benefits that it provides to society.

Delegated Legislation

Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 118(6) (Delegated Legislation Committees),

Representation of the People

That the draft Representation of the People (Northern Ireland) Regulations 2008, which were laid before this House on 14th May, be approved.— [Mr. Watts.]
	 Question agreed to.

Mr. Speaker: If it is convenient for the House, I shall take motions 3 to 7 together.
	 Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 118(6) (Delegated Legislation Committees),

Representation of the People

That the draft Service Voters' Registration Period (Northern Ireland) Order 2008, which was laid before this House on 14th May, be approved.— [Mr. Watts.]

Tribunals and Inquiries

That the draft Appeals from the Upper Tribunal to the Court of Appeal Order 2008, which was laid before this House on 4th June, be approved.
	That the draft First-tier Tribunal and Upper Tribunal (Composition of Tribunal) Order 2008, which was laid before this House on 4th June, be approved.
	That the draft Transfer of Tribunal Functions Order 2008, which was laid before this House on 4th June, be approved.— [Mr. Watts.]

Healthcare and Associated Professions

That the draft Health Care and Associated Professions (Miscellaneous Amendments) Order 2008, which was laid before this House on 4th June, be approved.— [Mr. Watts.]
	 Question agreed to.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE

Ordered,
	That, notwithstanding the practice of the House as to the intervals between stages of Bills brought in upon Ways and Means Resolutions, more than one stage of the Finance Bill may be taken at any sitting of the House.— [Mr. Watts.]

SWINDON TO KEMBLE RAILWAY (REDOUBLING)

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.— [Mr.  Watts .]

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: I should like to start, Mr. Speaker, by thanking you very much for giving me the opportunity to raise the subject of dualling the Swindon to Kemble railway line. I welcome to the debate my constituency neighbours, the hon. Members for Stroud (Mr. Drew) and for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood), and the Minister, who is in his place.  [Interruption.] Ah, yes. I also welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Gloucester (Mr. Dhanda), who is on the Treasury Bench, too.
	Two railway lines run through my constituency. In the north, the Cotswold line passes through via Moreton-in-Marsh, and in the south is the Golden Valley line, which serves Cheltenham via Kemble to Swindon, where it joins the Great Western main line to London. Both lines have been blighted by unacceptable delays, and although improvements have been made in recent years, the delays continue to frustrate regular commuters and infrequent travellers alike.
	One key factor behind the continued delays is that long sections of both lines are single track. The fundamental nature of the problem is that, self-evidently, only one train can pass on any single section at any one time. The section of single track on the Golden Valley line is located between Swindon and Kemble and is 12.5 miles long.
	In April, I, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Peter Luff), met representatives of Network Rail to hear their business case for the schemes. The meeting was held in advance of the release on 5 June of the Office of Rail Regulation's "Periodic review 2008: Draft determinations", which defines Network Rail's funding allocations for 2009 to 2014. Although there was some positive news in the ORR's report in that the green light was given for the redoubling of the Cotswold line, it was decided that, apparently, the improvements to the single-track section between Swindon and Kemble on the Golden Valley line do not conform with current Government priorities. Obviously, that was a huge disappointment, which the hon. Member for Stroud and I expressed in a meeting with the ORR on 12 June; it is also, of course, the reason why we are all here tonight.
	At this juncture, I hope that the Minister will note that although both lines pass through my constituency, their two closest stations are still about 30 miles apart—a journey that would take nearly an hour by road. The lines are used by completely separate sets of commuters and serve completely different regions of the country. Therefore, any claim that the two are connected in the county of Gloucestershire for funding purposes is completely fallacious. On the Kemble branch, delays and cancellations are frequent. The infrastructure cannot support an hourly timetable; delays are regularly exported from the line and Network Rail believes that significant demand from both passengers and freight is being suppressed because of those limitations.
	I should like to highlight what I consider to be a matter of importance regarding the ORR's decision not to allocate funding for this scheme. I have received, via two constituents, correspondence from the ORR. I think it erroneous, so I hope that the Minister will listen carefully. The letter, which has been sent to my constituents, states:
	"With regard to the Swindon to Gloucester line, Network Rail has determined that it does not need to redouble this route in order to achieve the requirements of the Government's High Level Output Statement (HLOS) for the period 2009-2014 and so has not put forward this scheme for funding under our present review of its outputs and charges".
	The Minister may be interested to know that I had a meeting with senior Network Rail representatives on Thursday and I asked them whether what that letter said was really true. They came out with this important statement:
	"Whilst this is correct in terms of the Capacity Metric, it is incorrect in terms of the Performance Metric.
	The scheme was identified by Network Rail as contributing to the delivery of the HLOS performance metric, over and above the schemes that are required to deliver the HLOS capacity metric.
	We confirm that the scheme was put forward to the ORR within the Network Rail HLOS Submission for funding as a performance scheme."
	I hope that the Minister will reprimand the ORR and ask it not to send out misleading information to my or anybody else's constituents.

Mark Harper: I, too, wrote to the ORR and its reply to me slightly contradicts the one that it sent to my hon. Friend. It specifically said that it felt that the scheme would have gone beyond the performance and capacity requirements specified in the Government's high level output specifications, and that that was why it had chosen not to fund it. Effectively, it said that it can meet the Government's requirements without implementing the scheme; effectively, it was blaming the Government rather than itself for not funding the scheme. It would be helpful if the Minister could clear up the discrepancy.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Clearly, this is a matter of contention. I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I did not mention him at the beginning because he was not in his place, but I am delighted that he is here. No doubt the Minister will wish to clear up the issue that my hon. Friend has raised.
	As I have said, Kemble station on the line is in my constituency. There are 18 daily Swindon-bound trains, of which eight terminate at London Paddington, and 18 Gloucester-bound trains, 17 of which continue to Cheltenham Spa. Passenger use of the station is on the rise; in 2006-07, the numbers were up 17 per cent. on those for 2004-05.
	As the current single-track alignment is mainly centred, it does not allow for a simple redoubling of the line. However, Network Rail has noted in a letter to MPs through whose constituencies the line passes that the scheme
	"offers value for money and wider benefits to the operation and performance of the route and wider network".
	What is really important is that in its assessment, Network Rail estimates that the scheme has a benefit-to-cost ratio of 9.96, which puts it in the category of offering very good value for money—better value for money, in fact, than some of the schemes that are proceeding. There are a number of reasons for that, and I should like to put them to the Minister. First, the scheme will provide for a reduced journey time, due to simplification of the layout at Swindon. The constraint of the current single-line operation will be removed, which, when combined with an increased capacity on the line, will allow for four trains per hour in each direction.
	Secondly, a redoubled line would offer a diversionary route for trains from a number of routes, affecting a great many regions. It would allow trains travelling to or from Wales to bypass the Severn tunnel when it is out of action due to maintenance, and it would provide a diversionary route for freight traffic travelling from Southampton to the west midlands and for trains from the south-west to the north of England, which is the preferred diversionary route. Thirdly, a redoubled line would provide much greater route flexibility, which has knock-on beneficial effects for several regions.
	Fourthly, another key cause of delays on the line is the age of the tracks, which need regular repair. The current single line limits the amount of work that can realistically be scheduled. A redoubled line would allow track work to occur more rapidly while maintaining a viable service.
	Fifthly, First Great Western has written to me firmly expressing its support for the improvements and has commented that the scheme
	"makes passive provision for a new station to serve the rapidly expanding North Swindon Area—helping reduce congestion and the broader environmental impact".
	The station at Moredon will be vital in working towards achieving the Government's aspirations on community sustainability in this area.

David Drew: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: I happily give way to my neighbour.

David Drew: I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. Does he agree that one thing that would help those of us who desperately want the redoubling to take place would be the publication of all the investigations that have gone on into this piece of line? There is a need for transparency that would help the arguments. We always seem to be there, or thereabouts, and then we fail at the final hurdle. If we got the information, at least we could have an open debate on the merits of the case.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman, and the Minister will have heard what he said. I hope that we can have an honest and open debate and that the Minister will make available to Members of Parliament any information that he has, perhaps through parliamentary questions, and we can get it out into the public domain in that way.
	Sixthly, the Golden Valley line is key to the new inter-city express programme— the IEP—from 2015 onwards. The IEP represents the high-speed train—HST—replacement and is designed to provide additional seating capacity and operational performance. Without redoubling, we will not be able to see the full benefits of the IEP.
	Finally, there is the possibility of the developments resulting in a saving. The closure of the Minety level crossing box would result in savings of approximately £300,000 per annum.

Martin Horwood: I congratulate my neighbour on securing this debate; he has my complete support. Does he agree that another environmental benefit of the redoubling taking place would be that many of the journeys that commuters take from towns such as Cheltenham Spa to Swindon to avoid the unreliable service would be improved because they would be able to take the more reliable service that would result?

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: I entirely agree with my neighbour. I will come to that later.
	I turn to the beneficiaries of this scheme. Where necessary, I will quote from a report from the Minister's Department of May 2007, "South West Regional Planning Assessment for the Railways", from which he will note that many of the aspirations listed are tied up with this 12.5 mile stretch. If—and it is a big if—there are no delays on the line, one can get on the 7.21 at Kemble station and be at London Paddington at 8.40, putting residents well within the magic figure of being two hours from the capital. The report notes:
	"Fast, frequent and reliable connections to main city centres and on longer distance routes (particularly to London, the Thames Valley and Heathrow) will be critical to maintaining and improving the South West's economic competitiveness".
	As Members here know, but the Minister may not, the south-west is a rapidly growing area. Gloucester is seen as a highly desirable town to live and work in, and it has been estimated that an extra 15,000 houses will need to be built in the town by 2026. That is complemented by the estimated 22,000 to 36,000 new jobs that are being created in Cheltenham and Gloucester in the same period. In Swindon, the population is estimated to grow by nearly 30,000 between now and 2026. In other words, between the three major towns and cities, we are looking at a growth in population of about 50,000 between now and 2026. Unfortunately, taking Cheltenham and Gloucester specifically, I cannot think of many other towns within two hours and 100 miles of London so poorly served by rail connections.
	This scheme has the backing of the Gloucestershire county council, The South West of England Regional Development Agency, the regional assembly, the district and urban councils and Gloucestershire's MPs—as can be seen by their presence here tonight. They all recognise the clear need for joined-up thinking from the Government in matching the transport infrastructure of the region with the expansions proposed by the regional spatial strategy.
	On 21 April this year, I called an Adjournment debate on another travel-related matter in my constituency, that of the road improvement scheme on the missing A417/419 link, and the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Glasgow, South (Mr. Harris) responded in that debate also. He will know from that debate that road congestion in Gloucestershire is building considerably. Studies for much of Gloucestershire paint a bleak picture of congestion on the roads. Given the anticipated population growth in the area, and the increased focus on the environment and reduced car usage, rail could provide a key part of the solution, as the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) indicated.
	I have produced a comprehensive list of the benefits that can be gained through a redoubling of the Swindon to Kemble line, and the Minister will have noted that it closely correlates with each of the nine key development objectives for the railway listed in his report, from which I have been quoting. Having shown the clear need to make this improvement, I would like to finish by highlighting the imperative of time. If the Swindon to Kemble redoubling does not feature in the ORR's funding priorities now, it will not feature again until 2014 at the earliest, because by 2010, we will see the massive redevelopment of Reading station, the Crossrail development and, perhaps, the recently announced proposed development of high-speed tracks throughout the country. My concern is that the budget, equipment and manpower for this scheme will not be in place if it is not scheduled by 2010.
	If the Swindon to Kemble improvement is not made now, it is likely that it will be delayed not just for five years but perhaps for another 10 or 20 years. Given that Network Rail estimates the cost of this scheme to be just £38 million, there can be few schemes in the country that offer such sustainability and connectivity, or which ensure regional economic growth for such good value for money, as I stressed through the indices I cited earlier. I hope that the Minister will cheer up the constituents of all my colleagues here tonight, and of others in the south-west, by assuring me that he will press the ORR to reconsider its decision.

Tom Harris: I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown) on securing this debate so soon after I responded in his earlier Adjournment debate on the A417. This is an important issue for his constituents and for rail users, especially those travelling on the Great Western main line. I also extend a welcome to other colleagues, particularly the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Mr. Dhanda) and my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew).
	Our railways are experiencing record numbers of passenger journeys and levels of freight. The Government's unprecedented levels of investment in the network are paying off, and that investment is set to continue. I begin by reminding the hon. Member for Cotswold that far from ignoring the need for crucial strategic investment in the railways, we are meeting our obligation to make record real terms investment in the railways—more than any other previous Government in the history of the railways, either Labour or Conservative.
	Last year's rail White Paper, which set out the high level output specification—HLOS—contained the improvements the Government want to buy over the five years to March 2014, and the money that we will commit to this. Our plans are for the biggest increase in rail capacity in a generation, which will result in a system capable of carrying a 22.5 per cent. increase in passenger demand by 2014. That equates to 6 billion additional passenger kilometres each year, and it will also accommodate 34,000 extra high-peak-hour passengers travelling into London each day and 10,000 extra into our other major cities. Some 1,300 additional carriages are being procured to help provide that capacity. We require reliability to improve further, taking the public performance measure from last year's high of 90 per cent. of passenger trains arriving on time to a new average high of 92.6 per cent across the network. Safety, too, will continue to improve, and we will introduce measures to reduce risks to passengers and workers by 3 per cent over five years.
	The Government's plans are affordable and deliverable, as the independent Office of Rail Regulation has just concluded. I emphasise the word "independent", because the independence of the ORR is a crucial part of the effectiveness of the rail industry structure. Earlier this month, the ORR published its draft determination of the funds that Network Rail should be allowed for the five years to 2014. It drew on the work that Network Rail and the train operators have done to show how they would deliver HLOS—work that Network Rail published in its November 2007 strategic business plan and updated in April 2008.
	The ORR has undertaken a detailed and thorough review and has challenged and tested each element of Network Rail's industry plan to see whether it is efficient. It has assessed the nature and extent of Network Rail's enhancement expenditure to determine whether it contributes towards the improved output that the Government want. In its draft determination, the ORR sets out the infrastructure schemes that it considers Network Rail should be funded to deliver. It explains the reasoning behind its conclusions and invites comments. It will take all comments into consideration before publishing its final determination at the end of October.
	The Great Western main line, of which the Swindon-Kemble line is part, is expected to benefit from huge investment, as it has expanded to be ready to accommodate the extra 637 million passenger kilometres of journey that we want it to carry by 2014. Longer peak trains will provide for the extra 2,900 peak passengers arriving at London's Paddington station every morning, and Maidenhead and Twyford station platforms will be extended to cope with them. As the hon. Gentleman said, Reading station and the surrounding rail junctions are to be rebuilt to deliver the increased network capacity required by 2014 and to meet the longer-term passenger and freight requirements at that busy crossroads.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: I am grateful to the Minister for his patient explanation, but would he not accept that a more reliable and regular service from Kemble to Swindon would enhance the modifications that he is making from Swindon to Paddington? If an unreliable service feeds into a more reliable service, the latter will be hampered.

Tom Harris: If the hon. Gentleman will just be patient, I have some positive things to say about the Swindon-Kemble line. I shall get round to them.
	In Bristol, train lengthening plans are being developed to provide additional peak commuter capacity. The route between Bristol and Birmingham is to benefit from line speed improvements, to enable faster journey times between the cities. In Cardiff, there will be a wide range of track, signal and station improvements to increase the capacity of the local network, with the Welsh Assembly Government contributing to a shared investment in the network that will let more and longer peak trains run.
	It is anticipated that our national stations improvement programme will fund improvements at Swindon, Gloucester and five other busy Great Western stations—Slough, Cheltenham, Chippenham, Newbury and Didcot. We plan that our access for all programme will, among other things, improve disabled access at Chippenham and Severn tunnel junction stations on the Great Western line. Station and track works will be undertaken to prepare the Great Western main line for the operation of a new generation of inter-city express trains, with services expected to start in 2016. At the London end of the route, we expect much of the work for Crossrail to be undertaken during the first HLOS period.
	Those schemes are all driven by the need to create the capacity and quality needed for the forecast growth in passengers and freight. The Swindon-Kemble line redoubling scheme that the hon. Gentleman supports has been developed more for the performance benefits that it would bring than for the capacity that it would provide. The demand that is forecast on the route can continue to be met by the current train services. Performance on the Great Western line has been so poor that earlier this year, the Government took formal action against the operator, First Great Western, to insist on improvement. In parallel with that, the ORR has warned Network Rail that there must be an improvement in punctuality and reliability or it will consider enforcement action.
	A joint performance improvement plan for the route has been developed by Network Rail and First Great Western, and the ORR is overseeing its implementation. Extra carriages are being obtained and additional drivers, guards and technicians recruited to improve reliability. There has been a steady overall improvement in route performance since April. I am cautious at this stage, and a lot remains to be done to ensure that better performance is embedded in the operation and becomes consistent, but the first signs are encouraging.
	It is in that context that the ORR has had to consider the two track redoubling schemes for Great Western routes put forward by Network Rail as candidates for investment in the HLOS period. Network Rail offered both the Swindon-Kemble line and the Oxford-Worcester line—the so-called Cotswold line—as optional enhancements in its April strategic business plan update to the Office of Rail Regulation.
	The Cotswold scheme involves partial redoubling between Oxford and Worcester to deliver performance benefits on the Cotswold line and consequential improvements along the Thames valley. It is calculated that the Cotswold redoubling would bring First Great Western performance to more than 90 per cent.—closer to the 92 per cent. performance requirement sought from long-distance routes in 2014 under high level outputs.
	The ORR heard evidence from the rail industry on both redoubling schemes for the Great Western main line. The train operators and Network Rail identified the Cotswold line as the preferred scheme, and not enough evidence was submitted to make the case for both schemes going ahead. The ORR's draft determination—I stress that it is only a draft determination—is that Network Rail should be funded to redouble the Cotswold line.
	That is welcome news for the Cotswold line, and it should bring significant benefits for the hon. Gentleman's constituents and the wider group of users of the Great Western main line. Network Rail plans to undertake the work early in the HLOS period, commissioning the enhanced line. It is not a case of choosing the cheapest. Network Rail estimated the cost of the Cotswold line works to be £51 million, against £32 million for Swindon-Kemble. The ORR has chosen the most efficient option and has satisfied itself that, overall, Network Rail is on target to deliver the service performance sought by the Government for 2014.
	I recognise the benefits in doubling the Swindon-Kemble route and we have heard several examples tonight from the hon. Member for Cotswold, my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud and the hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr. Harper). The project would improve performance on the Swindon to Gloucester route and on the Great Western main line. It would reduce the impact on train services to and from south Wales when the Severn tunnel and the route to Bristol Patchway are disrupted. Local and diverted long-distance train services could operate during planned engineering works instead of local services being displaced by diverted long-distance trains.
	Journey times would be fractionally improved as trains would not have to slow down for the turnouts into and out of the single track section. There is an aspiration for a new station in north-west Swindon that becomes more practicable if the line is a double track. The extra capacity would make it possible to operate additional local trains, should there be the demand for that.
	I understand that the rail industry now intends to develop the case for doubling the Swindon-Kemble line as well as the Cotswold line, and to put that case to the ORR as part of the response to the consultation. Although the ORR has determined that it would not fund Network Rail for projects the primary benefit of which is to improve performance or capacity beyond levels explicitly specified in HLOS, the ORR will take account of the need for a sustainable network plan and the longer-term needs of the railway. There must also be evidence that projects offer value for money. The hon. Member for Cotswold covered that in his comments.
	I encourage the hon. Gentleman and the rail industry to take account of those points in commenting to the ORR. At this stage, the case for redoubling the Swindon-Kemble line must be addressed to the ORR.

David Drew: I am pleased to hear what my hon. Friend is saying. Will he encourage the ORR to look at modal shift? We are not considering simply a route to London, but an opportunity to get people to work and live along it. Rather than using the car, they can use the train. It is vital to take that into account.

Tom Harris: That is a valid point in the general debate about achieving modal shift. I caution my hon. Friend against using the modal shift argument to the ORR during the consultation period. My understanding is that ORR will consider the scheme based on the capacity and performance targets that can be achieved in 2014 rather than on the modal shift. If I am wrong, I will write to my hon. Friend, but I understand that modal shift is not one of the metrics that the ORR would use to determine whether the scheme should receive funding.
	I understand the arguments in favour of doubling the Swindon-Kemble line. I will not comment on whether I was disappointed about the decision that the ORR reached in the draft determination, but I will commit my officials to working with the industry to make the case strongly to the ORR that redoubling the line should go ahead.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: What the Minister has just said is very helpful and sounds like good news as far as it goes. I was careful in my speech not to link the Swindon to Kemble line with the fact that the Cotswold line is to be partly redoubled. The Minister seemed to indicate that the performance target of the overall First Great Western area could be achieved by redoubling the Cotswold line. However, let me say to him gently that that line is used by a completely different set of commuters in a completely different part of the country. It would not be fair to the people who use the Kemble to Swindon line if it was knocked out because the Cotswold line was dualled.

Tom Harris: The hon. Gentleman does not have to worry too much about speaking to me gently or otherwise. I am quite happy to be talked to in a less then gentle way by him. I did not want to give the impression that the ORR was faced with an either/or decision on those schemes. The ORR will assess the schemes on their individual merit and on their effect on the performance and capacity of the network as a whole.
	As I said at the start, the Government have set out in the HLOS the improvements that we want to buy by 2014 and the money that we will commit to them. Having set the direction, and with the necessary funding, we now look to industry to deliver that. I understand the case that the hon. Gentleman and others have made for the redoubling of the Swindon-Kemble line, but we need to wait for the ORR determination process to finish. There is currently no case for the Swindon-Kemble project to be considered for exceptional funding outside HLOS. However, with the appropriate arguments made and the appropriate data provided to the ORR by the hon. Gentleman and my hon. Friends, I am confident that the case will be given a proper hearing. The ORR will be making its final determination in October. From my personal perspective, I wish the scheme a fair wind.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Adjourned accordingly at fourteen minutes to Eleven o'clock.